That's not due to regulations that's due to planned obsolescence. How cheaply and crappily can we make these refrigerators but we have to balance that with not making them so crappily that consumers won't buy our product again.

Take away the regulations, you'll still see the same issues.

This is near and dear to my heart because I see directly the 'hidden costs' of over-regulation, at least in one industry. I work in R&D for a financial software company, I could tick off a dozen of the largest banks and insurance companies that use our software.

90% of what I've worked on the past few years is regulatory, either US GAAP/TAX regulations or IFRS regs. We bill either our parent company--one of the biggest banks in the world--or one of the companies partnering with us to get the regs in the system in time, and we bill them millions. Nearly every meeting, every design session, every minute spent in dev or test is related to regulations, either those newly imposed or those being modified and adjusted, which happens all the time.

Who do you think ultimately 'pays for' the millions that we charge to our parent company, to our clients? And this is the tippity-top of the iceberg, these companies have to implement and upgrade and convert to get their financial data ready for processing, they need to adjust in-bound and out-bound streams to handle the new data, they need additional calculations and reports to deal with the regs, they spend more time with auditors to learn the regs, to show they're in compliance, etc etc.

And one simple example of a useless regulation is Expected Credit Losses, something IFRS has adopted and US GAAP has talked about adopting. It's fucking useless bullshit and will take millions for these bigger financial institutions to show compliance. Think about how long politicians debated the regs, how many hours auditors have spent analyzing the impact, how much time my single company has spent and will continue to spend updating our software, our clients spending money on upgrading, on learning the regs, etc....this one regulation will cost tens of billions world-wide, and it's not the financial institutions that'll be 'paying for it', that's for damn sure.