There is an additional point on the cost of regulation to business, in that there are often substantial scale economies to meeting regulations ... regulations that large corporations can easily incoporate into management functions that are required in any event can be a major headache to an owner / manager / principle operator.

And the efforts to "protect" small business by providing one-stop regulatory shops and other assistance with the burden of meeting regulatory requirement often do not really help out small business. And, indeed, we would not expect them too ... the federal dividing line between small and big business is 500 employees ... which means that the lion's share of regulatory assistance for "small business" actually goes to help out medium sized businesses, who can afford to big a higher price for government policies in their favor (indeed, that is probably how the dividing line got set so obscenely high in the first place).

I don't know what can be done about this except renaming the Small Business Administration the Small and Medium Enterprise Administration and starting a new Small Business Administration with two branches, one for firms with fewer than 100 employees, and a second for firms with fewer than 10 employees.

Regulations do not cost companies money. If a regulation is set up appropriately (see below) then it does not alter a firm's competitive position. All firms will bear the same burdens.

If the regulation raises costs (say health and safety regulations) then the firm has the option of taking a smaller profit or raising its prices. So, as with every other business expense, the costs are ultimately passed on to the consumer - there is no one else to pay after all.

The "appropriateness" of a regulation is where the fun starts. Most businesses try to game the system so that regulations (and conversely benefits like tax breaks) are not evenly applied. What they are looking for is government intervention to give them a competitive advantage. That this has been working quite well for the past 40 years is not a fault in regulation but a failure to have a truly democratic legislative process.

As long as we have a system where dollars vote and not people such market distortions will continue.

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

Most of my working life I have been the mikey who ends up stuck complying with assorted rules, regulations and paperwork from a variety of federal, state and association agencies.  I have been audited by these agencies and CPA firms every working year.  Eventually you do get kind of used to them but I still think the same thing as I did when I encountered them at my first job.  They punish the innocent more than the guilty.

Nice law-abiding people who would not break the rules in the first place are required to jump through extra hoops to prove their innocence into perpetuity while the not so law-abiding just move on to a new scam with maybe at most a fine and some community service.   Since any system that can be gamed will be gamed, this sequence repeats until you have a six-inch binder full of conflicting and confusing rules and regulations that nobody reads until someone finds a new loophole and you start a new binder.

Life would be more pleasant for more people with a few simple and sensible regulations reinforced by reasonable internal controls.  Then if someone breaks the rules or evades the controls, punish them not everyone else forever more.

/rant

Re-read ... I didn't say being excused from compliance, I said receiving help to comply.

Otherwise government regulations continue to have the side-effect of providing implicit protection for large oligopolists.

But telling a corporation to regulate itself, via industry compacts, is a lot like telling Christians to behave more like Christ. Excellent advice, but never followed.The "raise prices or take less profit" choice is a false one. The market price is always the most sellers think they can get, regardless of their costs. Only competition reduces market prices. So if the market price of rechargeable  toenail clippers is less than the metal, plastic, wires, batteries and labor to make them, that means people don't really want rechargeable toenail clippers very much, not that government should repeal labor and environmental regulations to make labor, metal, plastic and batteries cheaper! That company SHOULD go out of business.

Good questions above. From me, more later, but short summary is: carbon taxes and certainly gas taxes are not going to be completely adequate ways to abate carbon emissions or move the global economy to productive, efficient, and reduced carbon emitting energy consumption. It is going to be necessary for industrial processes and building materials to be changed by common convention extended across national boundaries. One way or the other, industries will have to provide the least expensive and most rapid solutions to the challenge and those solutions will have to be applied to bad actors, outliers, and free riders through law and regulation.