<i>&gt; I think this is where our views diverge.</i><p>Nothing you say in any way establishes that regulation by government works better than regulation by free market participants. All you&#x27;re doing is describing what government regulation does.<p><i>&gt; People usually view governments (the regulator) as third (intrusive) parties to the transaction, that&#x27;s not true.</i><p>Certainly it is. Government regulators do not give or receive anything as part of the transaction, which is the definition of &quot;a party to the transaction&quot;.<p><i>&gt; Governments are representatives of the people, and as such, regulators simply add a priori terms to a transaction.</i><p>And those terms are not voluntarily chosen by the parties; the parties have to accept them whether they would choose to in the absence of the regulations or not. Therefore the transaction is not voluntary.<p><i>&gt; Historically, regulation has managed to right some (not all) of the more awful side effects of free markets, including: child labor, deadly workplaces, labor bordering slavery, labor inequality, disastrous environmental externalities and more.</i><p>To the extent these things were &quot;awful&quot; (some, like child labor and labor inequality, weren&#x27;t necessarily that way), they were not &quot;side effects of free markets&quot;. They were side effects of markets that were meddled with by governments in different ways than governments meddle now. (Slavery, for example, was clearly not the result of a free market transaction; the slaves didn&#x27;t voluntarily agree to be slaves. It could only exist because governments legitimized the taking of slaves by force.)