>We don't live in a world like in 1905 where an earthquake would lead to a fire that burns down an entire city
I'm not convinced that that's true, and even if it is a huge chunk of population (world, US, pick your area, it applies broadly) keep fighting to regress us to these periods.
People complaining about rules they don't understand is in some sense as old as the existence of rules, but the internet has dramatically increased the number of people who consider themselves experts on politics, healthcare, construction, electrical code, and every other topic on the sun, and who are proud of ignoring the science and the rules and who go out of their way to avoid permits, inspections, etc.
At the same time a significant chunk of the population works to defund and defang all government, preventing the existing rules and codes - labor protections, fire protections, food safety protections, etc. - from being adequately monitored and enforced.
So you have a huge mix of things which are old and degrading, things which were never built right, and things which people are actively modifying in dangerous ways. People have a false sense of confidence build during the years where we were enforcing these rules; I do not believe that confidence is still warranted.
Plenty of things were built just fine or better and hold up with regular maintenance or modifications, and many are proving to have only been practical to build during a time that had a lower floor for better or worse depending on the thing.
Would some places have become what they are today had they not built their subway system when it was opportune or hilariously less expensive than it is now? The good things we can iterate on or refactor now would have way more overhead to build from scratch at todays standards, not all of which are inherently useful or justified. Sometimes a whole city burns down or all the labor was forced, which sucks and we don't want, but sometimes you're having to get shadow studies done to build anything higher than a bungalow
> At the same time a significant chunk of the population works to defund and defang all government, preventing the existing rules and codes - labor protections, fire protections, food safety protections, etc. - from being adequately monitored and enforced.
This isn't helped by actual bad rules and regulations on the books. Some minor examples are the prop 95 warnings on every damn thing or the way CAFE standards work to encourage the sale of more pickup trucks. I don't blame some people for wanting to scrap the whole regulatory system after encountering enough of these.
>I don't blame some people
You should. Just because something is imperfect doesn't make it bad. Should the truck loophole be closed? Yes. Has CAFE improved every other class of vehicle? Yes.
>I don't blame some people for wanting to scrap the whole regulatory system after encountering enough of these.
Regulation can used to save lives and improve outcomes, but it can also be used to suppress competitors or favor a particular business practice and stifle innovation.