[notahacker]

The idea that South Asians consumed poisoned lead because of high average levels of trust in the efficiency of their governments and their regulation of the food supply as opposed to low information on lead poisoning isn't one that survives contact with reality. So the "but the market would have solved this if only lead poisoning was legal" position is definitely an extreme one.

The world has had millennia of not regulating very much, and the market very rarely sorted it out.

[HarryHirsch]

The world has had millennia of not regulating very much

The one exception is weights and measures. There is a long tradition of regulating these strictly, because experience has shown that the market is incapable of driving the cheats out of business and that there must be trust in the markets because else trade will slow down.

[imtringued]

Government institutions save transaction costs. Yet we still got some anarcho capitalist idiots on the internet.

[Xorakios]

Most economists and left-leaning research institutes disagree with this. Transaction costs, both monetary and temporal, are always higher with more regulation and governmental institutional involvement.

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2006/N2505....

https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/tce_org_handbook_...

The arguments are usually about whether equity/fairness/outcomes are better, but cost in money and time is always higher.