By taking a look you'll find that regulations are commonly written by civil servants and various experts (which are typically not chosen by a vote) and then approved by people that you do get to choose by a vote.
We vote on the representatives, who in turn spend an awful lot of time talking to all sorts of interest groups - manufacturers, other parts of the economic chain, consumer and environmental protection organizations, lawyers, industry organizations, god knows what else - and in the end usually come up with decent regulations as a result.
I agree that the results can be sometimes weird, sometimes annoying, and sometimes outright dumb. But I'll rather pay that price than not have USB-C, two year product warranties, no lead in kids' toys or access to clean and safe drinking water.
Not terribly related but I got curious, the ELT has a reported angular resolution of 0.005 arcseconds. The sad state of public trust has resulted in many people no longer accepting the US landed on the moon at all. Tossing the question of what it would take to resolve the lunar landing sites into a LLM gives a broad requirement of 0.0005 arcseconds. Even still, you could never "prove" it to most people unless it's glass the entire way with no "hoax generating" computers involved.
It's easy to blame an individual administration but the reality is pure fiat currencies will always end in this way. When was the last time the US had a balanced budget? Clinton? If you don't have a constraint on printing new currency you will always print more.
A good example I heard today was this. Imagine if you have a legit money printer. Show me the most pure human and eventually they will hit that button and print new money. That's what we've been doing for a long time now to finance all the wars and bailouts.
It isn't just one administration. There's quite a bit of consistency over which administrations are "good" for the economy and the people, and which are "bad".
Oh we can happily blame every administration that did this. It may be the natural conclusion of this behavior but that doesn't mean we need to continually rush head first into trouble. The current administration absolutely needs to shoulder more scrutiny than the past ones because they are actively making decisions. They don't get a pass just because the others did it too.
