What Would America Look Like Without Regulations?

In a political environment where “cutting red tape” is a perennial campaign promise, it’s worth asking: why do we have business regulations in the first place? What purpose do they serve, and what would America look like without them?

The Birth of Regulation: When Free Markets Failed Us

Regulations didn’t appear simply to burden businesses or expand government power. They emerged as responses to very real problems that unrestrained markets either created or failed to solve.

The early 20th century offered a stark picture of unregulated capitalism. Workers faced dangerous conditions, consumers encountered adulterated products, and corporations wielded monopolistic power with little accountability. This era gave us cautionary tales that still resonate today.

The Horror Show of Food Adulteration

Before regulation, food adulteration wasn’t the exception—it was standard business practice. The list of common adulterants reads like a mad scientist’s inventory:

Milk and Dairy Products

Yes, milk producers did indeed add chalk to spoiled milk to mask its bluish-gray appearance.¹ But that was just the beginning. They also:

• Added formaldehyde (an embalming fluid) as a preservative, particularly in milk that was beginning to spoil²
• Used pureed calf brains to create a yellowish layer that mimicked rich cream³
• Watered down milk and then added gelatin, plaster dust, and various dyes to restore its appearance⁴
• Routinely sold “swill milk” from diseased cows kept in filthy urban distilleries and fed exclusively on distillery waste, causing thousands of infant deaths annually⁵

Bread and Flour

The staff of life was hardly nutritious when:

• Bakers added alum (a compound used in dyeing and tanning) to whiten bread, which inhibited digestion and caused constipation⁶
• Flour was bulked up with plaster of Paris, sawdust, and pipe clay⁷
• Sour or stale flour was disguised with ammonium carbonate⁸
• Chalk and ground bones were added to increase weight⁹

Confectionery and Sweets

Children’s treats were perhaps the most dangerous of all:

• Red candy was colored with red lead and mercury sulfide¹⁰
• Yellow candies contained lead chromate¹¹
• Green candies featured copper arsenite (also known as “Paris green”)¹²
• Chocolate was glazed with shellac containing arsenic for a shiny appearance¹³

Spices and Coffee

Common kitchen staples were rarely what they claimed to be:

• Cinnamon was frequently replaced with brick dust¹⁴
• Pepper was adulterated with dirt and ground rope¹⁵
• Coffee beans were substituted with chicory, burnt sugar, or ground-up animal bones and even charred lead¹⁶
• Tea leaves were recycled from hotels and restaurants, then recolored with Prussian blue (ferric ferrocyanide) and other toxic chemicals¹⁷

Beverages and Alcohol

Drinks were adulterated with particularly dangerous substances:

• Beer and rum contained cocculus indicus (a hallucinogenic plant) and strychnine to increase intoxication¹⁸
• Diluted beer was “restored” with sulfuric acid and green vitriol (iron sulfate)¹⁹
• Wine contained lead to enhance sweetness²⁰
• Gin was frequently contaminated with turpentine²¹

Preserved Foods

Preservation methods often introduced new hazards:

• Pickles and bottled vegetables were made vibrantly green with copper sulfate²²
• Canned meats contained borax (the substance used to kill ants) as a preservative²³
• Sausage makers used pyroligneous acid (“wood vinegar”) to mask the smell of rotting meat²⁴

The human cost of these practices was staggering. Children died from lead-poisoned candy. Infants perished from contaminated milk. Workers suffered chronic poisoning from daily consumption of adulterated staples.

When Cutting Corners Cuts Lives Short: Environmental Disasters

The story of environmental regulation is written in fires, spills, and catastrophes that could have been prevented with proper oversight.

Rivers on Fire

The Cuyahoga River fire of 1969 became an enduring symbol of industrial pollution. This Ohio river, choked with oil, chemicals, and industrial waste, actually caught fire multiple times—at least a dozen recorded instances between 1868 and 1969. But the 1969 fire captured national attention, appearing on the cover of Time magazine.²⁵

What’s remarkable is how common such pollution had become. A river so contaminated that it could ignite wasn’t seen as a catastrophe but as a cost of doing business. The burning Cuyahoga helped galvanize public support for the Clean Water Act and contributed to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency under Republican President Richard Nixon.²⁶

Deadly Fog

In Donora, Pennsylvania in 1948, a toxic combination of air pollution from the town’s zinc smelter, steel plant, and wire mill became trapped by a weather inversion. The resulting poisonous smog killed 20 people and sickened 7,000 more—nearly half the town’s population. Some victims died gasping for air, their lungs burned by sulfuric acid and other industrial pollutants.²⁷ The tragedy prompted the first national conference on air pollution and eventually led to the Clean Air Act.

Toxic Dumping

One of America’s most notorious environmental disasters occurred in Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Hooker Chemical Company dumped over 21,000 tons of hazardous chemicals into an abandoned canal, which it later covered and sold to the school board for $1.²⁸

By the 1970s, after houses and a school had been built atop and around the site, residents began experiencing alarming health issues. Children returned from playing in the area with chemical burns. Birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer rates skyrocketed. Toxic chemicals visibly oozed through basement walls and bubbled up in backyards.²⁹

Love Canal’s plight, championed by local mother-turned-activist Lois Gibbs, led to the evacuation of 800 families and the creation of the Superfund program (officially the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980). This landmark legislation gave the federal government authority to clean up abandoned hazardous waste sites and hold polluters financially responsible.³⁰

Oil Disasters

Long before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill shocked the nation. A massive blowout on an offshore oil platform spewed over 3 million gallons of crude oil into the Pacific, coating 35 miles of California coastline with thick, black sludge. The disaster killed thousands of seabirds, dolphins, seals, and other marine creatures.³¹

Images of oil-soaked seabirds and fouled beaches sparked national outrage and helped inspire the first Earth Day in 1970. The spill also led to important environmental legislation, including the National Environmental Policy Act requiring environmental impact statements for major federal actions.³²

When Work Meant Death: Workplace Safety Tragedies

Before workplace safety regulations, America’s industrial progress exacted a terrible human toll.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. In less than 20 minutes, 146 workers—mostly young immigrant women—perished, with many jumping to their deaths because exit doors were locked to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks.³³

Witnesses watched in horror as workers leaped from the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors, their bodies hitting the pavement with such force that one firefighter later recalled the “sickening thud” haunted his dreams for years. Fire ladders only reached to the sixth floor, leaving those above stranded.³⁴

The tragedy galvanized the labor movement and led to major legislative reforms. New York State created a Factory Investigating Commission that pushed through 38 new labor laws in three years—mandating fire escapes, automatic sprinklers, unlocked doors during working hours, and improved building inspections.³⁵ These New York laws became models for other states and eventually for federal regulations.

Mining Catastrophes

Mining was perhaps America’s deadliest occupation in the era before safety regulations. In a single day—December 6, 1907—362 men and boys died in the Monongah mining disaster in West Virginia when an explosion tore through connected coal mines.³⁶ The blast was so powerful it could be felt eight miles away.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. That same year, nearly 3,000 miners died in workplace accidents.³⁷ Mining companies, prioritizing profit over safety, resisted spending on ventilation systems, support structures, or safe equipment.

Public outrage over these mass casualties eventually led to the creation of the U.S. Bureau of Mines in 1910 and, decades later, to the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which established mandatory safety standards and inspections.³⁸ In the first year after this law took effect, coal mining fatalities dropped by 50%.³⁹

Black Lung Epidemic

Beyond catastrophic accidents, countless miners suffered slow deaths from black lung disease, caused by inhaling coal dust over years of work. Mining companies long denied the disease existed, calling it “miners’ asthma” and blaming it on workers’ poor health habits rather than workplace conditions.⁴⁰

It took a grassroots movement of miners and their widows, along with groundbreaking reporting by physician and journalist Dr. Donald Rasmussen, to force recognition of the disease. The Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 finally acknowledged black lung as an occupational disease and established dust limits and health screening for miners.⁴¹

Testing on Humans: The Struggle for Consumer Protection

The path to regulatory protections was neither quick nor easy. While the horrors of adulterated food, industrial pollution, and workplace dangers were evident to anyone who cared to look, proving harm and establishing legal protections required extraordinary efforts and often tragic catalysts.

The Poison Squad Experiments

In the realm of food safety, perhaps the most dramatic chapter was the “Poison Squad” experiments conducted by Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the early 1900s.

Facing industry denial about the dangers of common additives, Wiley devised a radical plan: he would demonstrate the health effects through controlled human experiments. In 1902, he recruited twelve young, healthy male civil servants who agreed to eat meals laced with increasing levels of widely used food preservatives.⁴⁴

The volunteers—soon dubbed the “Poison Squad” by the press—consumed their chemically adulterated meals in a controlled environment under medical supervision. They were served elegant, well-prepared meals three times daily, with one critical modification: half the men received food containing measured doses of chemicals like borax, salicylic acid, sulfuric acid, sodium benzoate, and formaldehyde.⁴⁵

The results were predictable and devastating. Squad members suffering from the preservatives experienced severe digestive distress, nausea, headaches, and other ailments. Some became so ill they had to drop out of the study. The experiments continued for five years with different preservatives, providing irrefutable evidence that these common additives were indeed harmful.⁴⁶

The High Cost of Proof

Wiley’s Poison Squad exemplified an unfortunate pattern that would repeat throughout the development of America’s regulatory framework: progress often came only after unacceptable human suffering. Whether it was children dying from lead-laced candy, miners succumbing to explosions and black lung disease, or families sickened by toxic waste in their backyards, regulation typically followed tragedy rather than preventing it.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire demonstrated the deadly consequences of unregulated workplace conditions, with young women leaping to their deaths from a burning building with locked exits. The Cuyahoga River fires showed that without environmental restrictions, industrial pollution could reach levels so extreme that waterways became flammable. Love Canal revealed how, without accountability for waste disposal, companies could simply abandon toxic chemicals that would later poison entire communities.

In each case, those advocating for protections faced fierce resistance from industries that prioritized short-term profits over human welfare. Companies denied harm, questioned scientific evidence, attacked the credibility of advocates, and wielded political influence to block regulatory measures. Only when disasters became too visible to ignore or scientific evidence too compelling to dismiss did meaningful protections emerge.⁴⁷

The Fight for Legislation

This pattern played out across sectors. In food safety, it took Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” exposing horrific conditions in meatpacking plants, combined with Wiley’s scientific evidence and years of activism by women’s consumer groups, to finally push Congress to pass the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.⁴⁸

In workplace safety, it required decades of mining disasters, factory fires, and worker deaths before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was established in 1970. Even then, this came only after the Farmington mine disaster claimed 78 lives in 1968, creating public pressure too great for politicians to ignore.⁴⁹

For environmental protection, the visual impact of the burning Cuyahoga River, the Santa Barbara oil spill, and growing evidence of widespread toxic contamination finally led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and eventually the Superfund program.⁵⁰

These legislative milestones established a crucial precedent: that the federal government had both the right and the duty to protect citizens from unscrupulous business practices that endangered public health and safety. They represented hard-won acknowledgments that unregulated markets alone couldn’t address certain fundamental societal needs.

The Purpose of Regulation: Achieving Common Goals

The historical examples of food adulteration, environmental disasters, and workplace tragedies illuminate a fundamental truth: regulations emerge not from abstract theories but from real human suffering. The blood, illness, and death that preceded our major regulatory frameworks represent the painful lessons that taught us why certain rules are necessary.

Protecting Essential Commons

Some resources are so fundamental to human well-being that they must be governed by standards that prevent their degradation. Clean air and water are perhaps the most basic examples. Without regulations like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, individual polluters gain economic benefits by externalizing costs (pollution) onto society at large.

Before these regulations, industries routinely dumped untreated waste into waterways and released toxic emissions without filtration. The result was rivers too polluted to support aquatic life—or that literally caught fire, as the Cuyahoga did—air quality so poor it triggered respiratory crises (as in Donora, Pennsylvania, where toxic smog killed 20 people in 1948), and drinking water contaminated with industrial chemicals that caused cancer clusters in communities like Love Canal.⁵¹

Today, while still imperfect, our environmental regulatory framework has dramatically improved these essential resources. The Cuyahoga River, once devoid of life and flammable, now supports more than 60 species of fish. Cities that once suffered dangerous levels of smog now enjoy significantly cleaner air. And thousands of former toxic waste sites have been remediated under the Superfund program, making communities safer.⁵²

Ensuring Public Health and Safety

Public health and safety represent areas where regulation has proven essential across multiple domains. Food and drug safety standards protect consumers from poisonous additives that once killed children and sickened adults. Building codes prevent the kind of fire hazards that led to the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster. Mining safety regulations have dramatically reduced deaths in what was once America’s deadliest profession.

The FDA’s rigorous approval process for pharmaceuticals emerged after the 1937 elixir sulfanilamide disaster, when a medication containing the poisonous solvent diethylene glycol killed over 100 people, many of them children.⁵³ Mining safety standards evolved after catastrophes like Monongah, where 362 miners died in a single day. Workplace protections developed in response to conditions that maimed or killed thousands of industrial workers annually.

Without such oversight, as history repeatedly demonstrates, market pressures can lead to dangerous corners being cut, with the most vulnerable populations—workers, children, poor communities—bearing the highest costs.

Promoting Fair Markets

Contrary to some ideological positions, regulations are often essential for markets to function efficiently. Securities regulations, antitrust laws, and transparency requirements help ensure that markets operate with sufficient information and competition to produce socially beneficial outcomes.

The aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash showed how unregulated financial markets could collapse under the weight of speculation, fraud, and information asymmetry. Similarly, the 2008 financial crisis revealed how deregulation of financial markets created risks that eventually imposed enormous costs on society.⁵⁴

Effective regulation establishes the rules of the game that allow for fair competition rather than a race to the bottom in safety, environmental standards, or consumer protection. When all businesses must meet the same baseline standards, companies that want to operate responsibly aren’t placed at a competitive disadvantage.

Preserving Human Dignity

Some regulations serve the essential purpose of ensuring that economic efficiency doesn’t come at the expense of human dignity. Child labor laws, minimum wage provisions, workplace safety standards, and anti-discrimination rules reflect societal values that certain practices are unacceptable regardless of their profitability.

Before such protections, children as young as five worked dangerous factory jobs, workers routinely lost limbs in unguarded machinery, miners died by the thousands, and employers could freely discriminate based on race, gender, or other characteristics. These regulations represent our collective determination that some market outcomes, no matter how economically efficient, are morally unacceptable.⁵⁵

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, with its young immigrant women jumping to their deaths because exit doors were locked, symbolizes why we need basic workplace protections. The black lung epidemic among coal miners illustrates why we can’t leave occupational health solely to market forces. The devastation of Love Canal demonstrates why we need accountability for the disposal of hazardous waste.

The Hidden Costs of Deregulation

When we discuss regulation costs, we often focus on what businesses pay to comply. Rarely do we calculate the costs of inadequate regulation—costs typically borne not by businesses but by workers, consumers, and communities.

Consider the 2008 financial crisis, estimated to have cost Americans $12.8 trillion.⁴² This disaster followed decades of financial deregulation, including the repeal of Glass-Steagall protections that had separated commercial and investment banking.

Or take the case of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which cost BP over $65 billion⁴³ and devastated Gulf Coast ecosystems and economies. Investigators found that lax regulatory enforcement contributed to the disaster.

Finding the Sweet Spot: Smart Regulation

The historical necessity of regulation doesn’t mean that all regulations are equally effective or that regulatory frameworks can’t be improved. The regulation debate needn’t be binary. The question isn’t whether to regulate but how to regulate effectively. Smart regulation can protect public interests while allowing businesses to thrive.

Countries with strong regulatory frameworks often rank highly in both quality of life and economic competitiveness. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report consistently shows that many highly regulated European economies rank among the world’s most competitive.⁵⁶

How do we achieve this balance? Consider these principles:

1. Evidence-based regulation: Regulations should address demonstrated harms, not theoretical concerns. Regulatory impact assessments help ensure interventions are proportionate to the problems they address.

2. Performance standards over prescriptive rules: Where possible, regulations should specify outcomes (e.g., maximum pollution levels) rather than methods (e.g., specific pollution control technologies). This gives businesses flexibility to innovate more cost-effective solutions.

3. Regular review and sunset provisions: Regulations should be periodically evaluated and updated or eliminated if they’re no longer serving their purpose or have become unnecessarily burdensome.

4. Stakeholder involvement: Engaging diverse perspectives—including businesses, workers, consumers, and experts—in regulatory development improves both effectiveness and legitimacy.

Beyond Left vs. Right: A Pragmatic Approach

Regulation isn’t inherently progressive or conservative. Republican administrations established many of America’s most important regulatory frameworks, from Theodore Roosevelt’s consumer protections to Richard Nixon’s environmental legislation.

The question shouldn’t be whether government should regulate business, but how regulations can serve public interests while maintaining economic dynamism. This requires moving beyond ideology to evidence-based policy.

When we examine regulation through this lens, we see it’s not about constraining freedom but rather about ensuring that our economic system works for everyone. Effective regulations create the conditions for sustainable prosperity by addressing market failures, reducing externalities, and protecting vulnerable stakeholders.

Looking Forward: Regulation for the 21st Century

Today’s regulatory challenges differ from those of the early 20th century. Digital platforms, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and climate change present novel regulatory questions that don’t fit neatly into existing frameworks.

Meeting these challenges requires regulatory innovation—not simply more or fewer regulations, but smarter approaches that can adapt to rapidly changing technologies and business models.

This might mean regulatory sandboxes that allow controlled experimentation, international coordination to prevent regulatory arbitrage, or algorithmic accountability mechanisms for AI systems. Whatever form they take, 21st-century regulations must balance innovation with protection, just as their 20th-century predecessors did.

Conclusion: The Regulation Paradox

The regulation paradox is that rules which appear to constrain business often enable capitalism to function more effectively and sustainably. By preventing race-to-the-bottom competitions that harm workers, consumers, and the environment, well-designed regulations create stable conditions for responsible businesses to thrive.

Rather than seeing regulation as inherently adversarial to business interests, we should recognize it as essential infrastructure for a functioning market economy—as fundamental as property rights, contract enforcement, and monetary systems.

The goal isn’t to eliminate regulation or to regulate for regulation’s sake, but to create rules that align private incentives with public welfare. When we frame the debate this way, we can move beyond partisan talking points toward pragmatic solutions that serve both economic prosperity and social wellbeing.