There is a bit of wisdom in this post on risk analysis of environmental stressors by James Broughel and Dima Yazji Shamoun at RealClearPolicy that you might want to reflect on:
The first is that there are no absolute choices; there are only tradeoffs. Regulations that address risk induce behavioral responses among the regulated. These responses carry risks of their own. For example, if a chemical is banned by a regulator, companies usually substitute another chemical in place of the banned one. Both the banned chemical and the substitute carry risks, but if risks are exaggerated by an unknown amount, then we remain ignorant of the safer option. And because LNT detects — by design — low-dose health risks in any substance where there is evidence of toxicity at high doses, businesses are led to use newer, not-yet-assessed chemicals.
Economic costs borne from complying with regulations also produce “risk tradeoffs.†Since compliance costs are ultimately passed on to individuals, lost income from regulations means less money to spend addressing risks privately. When their incomes fall, people forgo buying things such as home security systems, gym memberships, healthier food, new smoke detectors, or safer vehicles. And when regulators inflate publicly addressed risks but leave private risks unanalyzed, it becomes impossible to weigh the pros and cons of public versus private risk mitigation.
There is good reason to believe that deadweight loss is among the most important factors in modern economic growth. That means that getting regulations right and administering them consistently are vitally important. Just throwing new regulations against the wall to see which ones stick is a bad risk.
