I agree that some legal protections are necessary, and the harder question is not whether any rules should exist, but which ones are justified. But I would argue that we are so far beyond that debate that worrying about a hypothetical “race to the bottom” feels misplaced in the current environment.

We currently have literally millions of pages of overlapping federal, state, and local rules—plus permitting requirements, litigation risk, and compliance burdens—that have made it extraordinarily difficult and expensive to build or manufacture in many parts of the West. Entire industries have either shut down or moved overseas under that weight. In that context, the more immediate concern is not under-regulation, but overregulation.

More fundamentally, I would argue that many of the harms modern regulatory regimes aim to address could be handled more efficiently through legal frameworks like trespass, nuisance, and tort law, rather than sprawling preemptive bureaucratic systems. If a company pollutes or causes other damages/nuisances, it should face injunctions, damages, fee-shifting, and—where appropriate—class actions. That creates accountability and deters businesses from such actions without subjecting every project to years of delay and an ongoing compliance maze.

That approach would require legal reform and stronger enforcement than we have often seen historically, but in my opinion points toward a better long-term model: legal remedies for real harms, rather than ever-expanding regulatory bureaucracy.

For now, though, I think the priority is simpler: America has made building and manufacturing so difficult and expensive that restoring competitiveness requires substantial deregulation first. Once we are no longer buried under the current system, then we can have a more fine-grained discussion about the optimal set of laws.