Regulation is necessary: nay, essential. The thing is though, it does rather depend upon who is doing the regulating and how they're doing said regulating.
I would, as an example, most certainly say that companies need to be regulated in the prices they can charge for their products. Darn tootin' they shouldn't be allowed to charge whatever they want. The who should regulate in this case is us the consumers. The how is by simply not purchasing what we think isn't a good deal.
There are also bit of regulation that seem a bit over the top. For example, this from the Coyote Blog:
After over three years of effort, and many, many checks written to numerous departments, Ventura County has granted us the right to operate a fuel tank at a particular location near Lake Piru, CA. This is actually a huge improvement, and will be much safer and less liable to create a spill than the current methods of schlepping around zillions of 5-gallon cans in a pickup truck.
However, we still have not, after 3 years of trying, obtained a permit from self-same Ventura County to install said tank. So it is currently legal for us to own, posses, and operate a fuel tank at the permitted location but still illegal for us to install one there.
Then there's the truly insane regulations:
The proposal fine-tunes blending mandates for 2012 called for by the federal renewable fuel standard, and EPA said yesterday it expects to require a total use of between 3.45 million and 12.9 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels next year. Officials said the final figure could come out to more or less than the 6.6 million gallons required in 2011. Charles Drevna, president of NPRA, said given that EPA’s own data show the ethanol industry has produced no qualifying fuel in the past year, the requirement for blenders to either use the fuel or pay EPA about $1 per gallon for a credit makes no sense.
Yes, you did read that right. The EPA is fining people for not using a product that doesn't exist.
As I say, regulations are essential but it does depend upon who is creating them and what the actual regulations are. Consumer regulation of producers works rather well: bureaucratic regulation seems not to work at all.
