I beg to differ. It will make a small number of us free to do things not currently permitted under government regulations. The rest of us will have to live with the fallout from that. Specifically, businesses large and small will now be able to do things not currently permitted.
The new administration has already issued permits for a previously blocked practice: dumping coal ash. Pickens County, South Carolina is seriously concerned about a proposal to dump coal ash from another state in a landfill in their county, apparently whether they like it or not. And they don't. Dumping substances into streams isn't a problem restricted to coal country. My husband is from Wisconsin and he has told me stories of creeks poisoned when dairies simply dumped their waste whey into streams, rather than pay to dispose of it. This was decades ago. And remember the Gold King Mine waste water spill in 2015? There were regulations against that, but contractors working on the mine didn't follow the regulations properly and destroyed an entire ecosystem.
If you look back at history, many of the regulations that annoy businesses so much were created because at some point, businesses did things that seriously harmed people, to the point that the government (urged by its voters) told them, "You can't do that any more." Here are some random examples. I didn't research these; this is what I can think of offhand. A lot of these changes came from labor union negotiations, or from citizens joining together to protest a situation.
- The windows in your cars have to shatter into tiny squares with not much edge, so as not to slice you to pieces in a collision. I'm old enough to remember when car windows broke like any other window, and a piece of the windshield, if you were unlucky, could cut your throat.
- You can buy a car today with reasonable expectation that it will not only protect you in a crash, but will not emit noxious vapors that pollute the air; all due to government regulations that make cars more expensive to produce. I remember when none of that was true. In particular, I remember when the air in Los Angeles was so bad that your eyes began to sting when you drove through the pass on the Grapevine at the edge of the plain containing the city - 1,500 feet above sea level and 88 miles away from downtown L.A.
- You must be paid extra wages if you work longer than 8 hours a day, or on a weekend or holiday. These rules came about, through union bargaining, because before the rules, you could essentially be forced to work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, at threat of losing your job if you complained. Research the history of factory work in the late 19th and early 20th century if you think I'm kidding.
- If you're injured working on your job, you can apply for worker's compensation to pay for your treatment, which your employer is required to pay into as a form of insurance. Before worker's comp, if you were injured on the job, you were probably just fired - which left you broke and unable to work.
- Food you buy at the store can't contain poisonous substances. The classic recent example of this happened in China in 2008, when milk and infant formula adulterated with melamine (cheaper than protein but looks like protein on analysis) poisoned approximately 300,000 infants, of whom 6 died from kidney damage and 54 were hospitalized. Yeah, that's the same melamine in some dishes. The World Health Organization said this was "clearly not an isolated accident, [but] a large-scale intentional activity to deceive consumers for simple, basic, short-term profits." The FDA, which is at considerable risk of being eliminated, is why you don't worry about this here.
