Uh, it used to be until it was gutted in the last 30 years. Legislation and bureaucracy has been one of the most successful interventions for public health for centuries.
Read about the hole in the ozone layer. Banning lead paint. Read about the invention of public water authorities. Read Silent Spring and read about its aftermath. Look into the history of air pollution and the EPA. These are some of the crown jewels of human history.
There has never been a point where tipping point public demand for regulation did not lead to regulation (if it was for example unconstitutional to regulate). Which makes the assertion that regulation is the solution unprovable.
If the FDA never got established, would firms emerge that put their seals of approval on medicine and become trusted? We will never know. It's pointless to point out what happened before the FDA and after because these are not random samples, the FDA didn't get randomly created. The demand for the FDA if denied would have transformed into the demand for something else.
We will also never know the progress in medicine we lost due to the red tape. There would of certainly been scandals and deaths, but if we got a cancer cure as a result would it not have been worth it?
I suspect that if regulation was not a feature of government we would of solved it in other ways, such as the ability to pierce the corporate veil both civilly and criminally for gross negligence etc. And third parties whose only product is trust - these parties would have infinitely more incentive to preserve that trust than governments.
You say regulation solving problems is unprovable when we have many examples of it doing so, then you claim that without regulation, we would solve things other ways, without any examples of that ever happening, let alone on a large scale. To “pierce the corporate veil both civilly and criminally” is legislation, as laws determine what is criminal. We also had exactly that in the US, where corporations lobbied for reduced regulation, saying that lawsuits would keep them honest through monetary losses. They then immediately went about lobbying to reduce lawsuit liability, cap payouts, and launched a vast PR campaign to paint lawsuits as money grabs by unscrupulous people looking for a payout.
And why wouldn’t a company “whose only product is trust” not be incentivized to sell that trust to the highest bidder? Companies sell out all the time and continue to do good business for a decade or more on customer trust they built up or came with the brand name they bought.
The saying “regulations are written in blood” comes to mind. So where are all the examples of things getting fixed through other means when regulation isn’t written to fix something?
You are mistaken; legislation is not what achieved those. Massive, focused public scrutiny on pinpoint issues is what achieved those.
Passing legislation without the latter is meaningless, and if you have the latter, you don't necessarily need legislation; the free market will force a correction (although politicians will follow the will of the people anyway).
You cannot achieve that across the countless toxins and/or potential toxins that exist in our world; the public does not have enough attention to spare for that.
Or to put it more simply, regular people don't have the time or energy to spare on worrying about every little thing that could potentially, maybe be toxic, in some tiny way over decades.
> and if you have the latter, you don't necessarily need legislation; the free market will force a correction
The free market is very bad at solving problems with a lack of information. Efficient markets rely on buyers having a clear idea of what they're buying. You might hope that people are willing to pay for certification services or whatever, but this is not actually how naive consumers operate. There are already services like that and they operate on the fringes.
The notion that there is not enough public attention to ask for legislation about toxins as a general concept ("pinpoint" is demonstrably not needed), but there is enough attention for that same public to navigate an information marketplace about those toxins to make informed buying decisions, is laughable. Even more so when the former has actually happened multiple times and the latter remains a niche phenomenon.
Have legislation and bureaucracy been the driving force or the symptom?
Government action in democracies just about always lags public support (because you need the public to support a thing so you can say "elect me I'll do it" or "re-elect me I did it").
Trump voters think EVERY one of these events was horrible/bad and should be rejected. If they could read and pay attention to the red scare they'd know that they would want to put Rachel Carson in front of Joseph McCarthy
They want a return to using Lead/Asbestos, a return to incandescent light bulbs, gutting/defunding/removal of most federal consumer protection and health, and environmental agencies. They think that the Ozone hole was a myth invented by globalist ZOG Soros funded marxists.
Right now, the dominant cultural narrative is Schadenfreude. Shitting up the environment to make someone you hate feel bad is absolutly the most popular approach to regulation right now. This is why hardcore southern conservatives love to "Roll Coal" and it's also why Trump just shared an AI generated meme of him literally shitting on America.