If heroin is legal, nobody forces you to buy it. If generic insulin is illegal, you're in trouble.
No government is lawlessness, which is MUCH worse than a mediocre government.
I'd argue that up to a point, lawlessness is worse than even a bad government.
And nothing can beat a good to great government.
If you don't want regulations, sure, Somalia is that way --->
How do "we" fix it? You can vote for two Senators and one Congressperson and even assuming that your vote in particular was the deciding vote and one of your choices on the ballot was someone actually inclined to do something, you now have a legislature in which the bad laws pass with a margin of 33 Senators and 174 members of Congress instead of 35 and 175.
The only way to fix it would be to fix the structural incentives in place, i.e. institute more checks and balances to prevent regulatory capture. But this is the chicken and egg problem -- to change the rules you have to be in power, but if you're already in power then you like the existing rules because they're the things that put you in power.
Or in times of populism, you use your power to remove the rules that were meant to constrain opportunities for corruption because they're inconvenient to your agenda, and then those constraints stay gone because they're inconvenient to the next administration's agenda too. So how do you get them back, or introduce new ones?
> And nothing can beat a good to great government.
The best form of government is a benevolent dictator. The worst form of government is a malevolent dictator. But the only difference is who is in charge, which changes over time.
> If you don't want regulations, sure, Somalia is that way
Is there some way we can get past the thing where people are unable to distinguish between the government prohibiting acts of violence and the government prohibiting informed consensual interactions between adults and imposing competition-destroying bureaucratic rules at the behest of incumbent megacorps?
Accepting that fact is hard, but it's reality.
There are two ways to deal with the fact that some people make poor decisions. The first is to teach people to make better decisions. This is obviously the correct answer, because it needs to be done anyway, because the second is insane. The second is to make all of their decisions for them.
And there is no "them" -- they're us. The people making the laws are just as human as anyone else. All you're doing is punting the decision to a different fallible entity which has less information because they're choosing in the abstract without the benefit of context. And causing errors to be universal rather than individual, resulting in systemic risk and lethal monoculture.
It's far better to have 20% of people make the wrong choice than 100%.