State regulators don't regulate. They protect.
Who do they protect? Well, one could be forgiven - if one has bought the mainstream narrative - that they regulate 'markets'. But do they?
I say no. Markets can only really ever be regulated, for the purpose of setting standards of quality for goods and service provision, at a decentralized level. Centralized regulation works for the most obvious cases of violation of property rights: theft(of which fraud is just one type) and physical violence. But such centralized regulation is on shaky ground from the very start, since it, itself, depends on the violation of property rights i.e. taking by force what belongs to another. This is what makes the growth of the State, which leads to the very worst degrees of Socialism, so very difficult to stop. It is essentially a problem which has its roots in proper categorization of human actions.
State 'regulators' protect selected producers only... and they do so at the expense of everyone else (other producers, including would-be producers, as well as consumers).
When the State's advocates claim that lawmakers are passing laws to protect consumers, do they ever warn against something referred to as 'State Capture'? Do they ever mention their record when it comes to saying 'no' to the highest bidder? The highest bidder, who sees an opportunity - as an 'industry standards bearer' - to 'protect consumers' whilst having the not-so-inconvenient 'side-effect' of eliminating or preventing competition from mounting a successful challenge in offering value to consumers?
When you hear the term 'State regulation' or 'government regulation', consider that no State has managed to shrink in terms of privilege it dispenses to a few, at the expense of the many, without a crisis or a semi-crisis.
The real regulator is the consumer, although he is currently more properly referred to as an absentee regulator.
An 'absentee regulator' because he has been duped out of the primary role belonging to consumers in a Laissez-faire capitalist system i.e. to bear all risk he chooses not to mitigate against, with there being no artificial(State-created) barriers to any such mitigation.
This is the real inconvenient truth a tiny few have been keeping very quiet about. That is to say the power resides in the hands of those who have been intimidated out of exercising it.
Jefferson quote: 'The price of freedom is eternal vigilance'.
Might Jefferson have been referring to something required of each consumer, in maintaining legal restraints on the power of their own politicians and civil servants? (Lest those servants become the masters.)