You are arguing against a straw man. I didn't just say "regulation", I said onerous regulation.

There should be little doubt that onerous regulation not only exists but is commonplace in the US at the moment. The sheer size of the federal register is indication enough, it's simply not possible for any one person to fully understand the law that they are subject to, period.

Effective regulation is often good. For example, I don't think the western world would have so quickly improved its air quality in the mid to late 20th century without regulation, and that has improved the lives and well-being of hundreds of millions of people. But effective regulation is difficult and sometimes requires great skill to create. In contrast, the hodge podge of laws and business rules that we have today is downright kafkaesque in its maddening mixture of arbitrariness and severity.

Most importantly, even laws and rules put in place by people operating in good faith and with the best of intentions can have ill effects. The law of unintended consequences is perhaps the most important factor in creating regulation, but it is a law that is frequently ignored by policy makers.

Consider something simple, the labor laws which force a transition in employment type around the 40 hours per week boundary, such as offering benefits and so forth. This causes many employers to use a larger number of part-time workers. Is this because those employers are evil or shirking their responsibility? Well, not necessarily, it may not be feasible to have employees for a given position provided with benefits. And even if it were and the employers were merely being "greedy bastards", would it change anything? Has the law been able to compel employers to avoid hiring part-time workers? Not at all. And the unintended consequence is that if someone has a desire to work 40 hr weeks (or longer) at an entry-level position in order to have a higher income this is just not available to them (at least without working "under the table"). Instead they need to work multiple part-time jobs, but they end up spending more time traveling to/from each job and they may have difficulties with the schedule of each job meshing with the other. In the end many people end up worse off with these labor laws, because it is more difficult and more costly to be able to work enough hours to make a decent living. And these are the workers who are the poorest, working entry-level jobs, and with the greatest desire to work. Precisely the people most in need of help, and instead they are put at a disadvantage.

As to your point about the tax burden mid 20th century, it's utterly off base. The government is collecting a much higher percentage of the total GDP of the country today than it was then. Regardless of the nominal tax rates (which are rarely reflective of effective tax burdens) the actual revenue collection has gone up. Additionally, I wasn't talking about the US in that case, I was talking about countries such as Denmark, Sweden, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, etc. Each of those countries has a tax burden higher than 1/3 of the GDP, in some cases approaching half of the GDP as in Denmark and Sweden. When you consistently take so much of the GDP for government use and you use so much of it on programs that impact the daily lives and livelihoods of so many citizens there is frequently no room for paying off debt because doing so means not just reducing outlays to the level of a balanced budget but even deeper to provide a surplus.