This is the straw-iest of strawmen and I see it all the time. LITERALLY nobody is advocating zero regulations. Because fully unregulated was what made LA air so awful in the 60's. BUT... LA has a special problem with geography that makes this a much bigger problem for them than many places. So they needed more regulation but other places needed less. Note that less is not zero. So one can clearly make the leap that places with a bigger problem need tighter restrictions than those that do not. The right balance.
But it never stops growing. The people who make and enforce the regulations have nice well-paid jobs and want to keep them, so they keep finding more and more stuff to regulate until they are going after trivial stuff as that is all that is left. And then the same types in other areas feel the need to do the same so they start applying too much regulations to their environment much for the same reason. You will never hear any government/regulatory type say "I think we got it nailed now. No more need to go further." So we end up with OVERregulation. And the answer still is not zero, nor was it ever. The answer is a cost-benefit analysis (I mean a REAL one) that tries to strike a balance.
