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Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers to win the rules we have now; tearing them down just means ordinary people will pay the price all over again.
Capture is a failure mode of every institution humans have ever built, including the courts we presumably still want. The answer is to design better institutions, not to get rid of them and hope things work out.
In the sense that we didn't have, say, the FDA, yes, that's true. But that doesn't mean food production, for example, was unregulated. It means it was regulated by the voluntary choices of people producing and consuming food. That system did not produce "mountains of dead children and poisoned workers". Those things happened after food production became a mass industry, not before.
There was a difference, before food production became a mass industry: most people knew the people who were producing their food, personally. That does change the incentives involved. One could make a case that, now that food production is a mass industry, and people don't for the most part know personally anyone who is involved with producing their food, we need regulations that we didn't need before. But that's a different argument than the one you're making.
One could also make a case the opposite way, that governments already had the tools in place to regulate food production as a mass industry--for example, by stopping large food corporations from using mafia-like methods to bully their supply chains--and failed to use them, which resulted in a bigger government--the Federal government--stepping in and stomping on them. And that the result of that, now, as I pointed out in another post elsewhere in this thread, has not been "safe food" that we didn't have before: we have meat full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops are crowded out, etc.
> The answer is to design better institutions
That effort has been going on for millennia. As Dr. Phil likes to say, how's that workin' out for ya?
Or, if you want another common saying, isn't the standard definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results this time?
The massive power that corporations have, as compared to individuals, is itself a product of the fact that our society has evolved now for well over a century to have government regulations that are bought by corporations to favor them. So you are correct that we can't just instantly scrap every government regulation, but not change anything else.
That does not mean that the regulations, on net, are doing more good than harm. It just means we've gotten ourselves into a very deep hole, which we can't climb out of in a short time. But at the very least we could try to stop digging.
The Chicago meat packing industry, for example, did much the same kind of bullying of their supply chains that Amazon and Walmart are now infamous for. And governments that were supposed to be preventing that sort of thing (since much of it was illegal even then--the tactics are basically the same ones organized crime has used for centuries, after all) did absolutely nothing to stop it. The Federal government finally stepping in and passing laws and regulations was not a case of government reining in a free market; it was a case of a bigger government stomping on a smaller government.
It did improve things, at least for a time, but what's the condition of the Chicago meat packing industry now? Or for that matter our food supply chain in general in the US, which has been regulated up one side and down the other for more than a century? We have beef full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops can't be grown profitably because the government doesn't subsidize them the same way, and a massive epidemic of obesity. So how is government regulation helping, exactly?