U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated

Save lives?: X

Increase safety?: X

Make more money?: YES

The USCSB makes life safer for everyone in this country, especially people that work around potentially dangerous chemicals and pressurized equipment.

I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't actually save any money or make anyone much more money. It's just a result of mindlessly fetishizing the past and misattributing past periods of rapid industrial growth to lack of regulation. The real cause was rapid population growth at the time, war, and extremely rapid adoption of bedrock industrial age technologies like electricity.

Today we have a fully deployed modern infrastructure and slow to negative population growth. Cutting regulation won't change that.

How are so confident in causality here?

The population thing is pretty elementary. If population is flat to declining, then growth is demand constrained.

There are some areas where you could uncap growth by cutting regulation, but they're not this. The #1 one I'm aware of is housing construction in high cost metros.

I see your point, but not totally buying it. The US innovates for a global population, one that’s still growing.

The best way to infer causality is through experimentation. If regulation does go away, we’ll measure and learn if it actually worked.