That proposition is an entire political philosophy within itself, one that has been violated and ignored. You see we talk about regulating the economy a lot, and regulating this and that, and a lot of people throw out accusations of socialism, and fascism and all this, but even if we don't want to go that far, we've fundamentally violated our own ideals in the most critical way once we allow government to regulate our rights. That, however we've already done.
It really depends on the regulations; right now, many of the regulations were authored by corporations to limit competition, broaden profits, and otherwise protect their bank accounts... this invariably hurts the middle class.
But if you turn that coin around a bit, or observe some of the few surviving GOOD regulations still on the books (don't worry, "conservatives" are still trying to eliminate these too), the best way to examine them in terms of governments original role of acting as moderator, referee, and guarantor of an individual's rights to pursue health and happiness is to ask, in any given case, how one party's right/freedoms impinge upon anothers.
FOR EXAMPLE:
Factory Farming Corporation A wants the freedom to do anything they can to increase their profit margins. This is the current atmosphere in america, and has been so since Reagan's time. If we comply with this, there are consequences. FFCA can increase its margins in multiple ways: Reducing expenses on quality testing, reducing expenses by doing the same job on less territory (i.e., fields), reducing expenses by avoiding proper maintenance (read, massey and exxon and transocean and thousands of others), reducing expenses by dumping or ignoring waste rather than removing or cleaning it, reducing expenses by making fewer people work longer hours for less wages and fewer benefits, increase prices by eliminating competition, increase margins by avoiding your taxes, so on and so forth.
Now, if you examine these means individually, you can examine the consequences more directly:
- Less/No Quality Control -- In order for 'free-market' FFCA to make more money, they have lobbied congress and agencies to get rid of key regulations requiring them to expend time and resources making sure their product (in this case, for example, BEEF) meets a base minimum of quality (i.e., safety.) As a result, they gain the freedom to stop testing the meat, fill the meat full of industrial chemicals, and ship the meat via means that are intrinsically dirty... why? its cheap. The result, however, is that the end consumer loses the freedom to go to the store and buy untainted food. In many cases, this leads to the loss of freedom to be free of bacterial/viral diseases, carcinogenic chemicals, and other afflictions which, in turn, deprives them of the freedom to keep some of their money instead of having to spend it on avoidable medical/funeral expenses. On entity's freedom came at the cost of another's.
- Compacted Operating Space - Since real estate is increasingly more precious what with more and more entities (people, governments, militaries, and corporations) competing for it, another way for FFCA to keep a larger share of its profits is to do the same job in less space. This sounds efficient and often can be, and sometimes positively so... but in the case of factory farming, as one blatant modern day example, this comes at the cost of the health of the crops and/or animals involved. In some cases entire horizons are dominated by fields of animals pressed shoulder to shoulder standing in their own leavings, sometimes for the majority of their lives, eating from food sources they did not evolve to digest easily. While this increases the freedom of FFCA to keep more of it's money, it is still relevant to point #1, depriving the consumer the freedom to have a healthy food product to eat, the freedom to have their health, and the freedom to keep some of their money by not having to go so routinely to the hospital and/or delay unnecessary funeral expenses.
- Avoiding Maintenance - You should read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" sometime for exposure to a time when a business's freedoms trumped a worker's freedoms in terms of workplace safety, machine maintenance, et cetera... but then again, you can see modern day examples of this today. Coal mines exploding, oil rigs exploding, gas lines exploding, buildings collapsing, people falling into machines, et cetera. Given all the machination that FFCA has undergone in order to replace workers and make the few who remain all the more productive, the odds for workplace injuries increases, and exponentially so when, in order to avoid added costs, FFCA pursues its freedom to neglect maintenance. Granted, accidents can happen pretty much no matter what.. however, in decades in which workplace regulations are stronger, the is a strongly correlative decrease in workplace accidents such as these. So, yes, while FFCA gains the freedom to make more/keep more money, it's workers lose the freedom to work in a safe environment.
- Less/No Waste Control - Some parts of this were touched on in #2, but there are diverging examples as well. One of the easiest things for FFCA to do in order to keep more of its 'free-market' earned money (to say nothing of FFCA's CEOs keeping more of their take-home pay due to dramatically reduced high-tier tax rates)) is to reduce any expensive measure needed to limit waste creation, and then just to dump that waste wherever is most convenient. Because it is cheap, FFCA gains the freedom to make/keep more money... but all the locals (whether they work for FFCA or not) are losing their freedoms to have clean air and water, their freedom to be healthy, and their freedom to keep money that they'll instead have to spend desperately trying to fake the veneer of healthy and the local de-regulated for-profit hospitals who, also having 'freedoms' are gouging the hell out of a captive audience.
- Screw Your Workers - this can occur in so many ways. FFCA can, for example, gain a freedom to keep/make more money by giving less of it to their workers. Most are in no position to object, after all, since they're desperately trying to survive, at this point, what with their horrible lack of health. Further, the reduced pay and benefits further reduce that worker's power to stand up for themselves or opt to buy slightly more expensive but far more valuable alternative products. When this doesn't work, a more 'free-market' free trade and highly de-regulated system allows FFCA to export much of the labor (and factory) to far more 'free' (read, india, indonesia, and china) markets where workers can be properly abused. This dramatically increases FFCA's freedoms to make/keep more money, but at the cost of the native's freedom to, you know... work. Of course, with the dirty water, dirty air, and tainted meat to eat (assuming they can even afford it anymore), they might as well just go ahead and succumb to the carcinogens rather than seek obtusely expensive medical care from the local free-market hospital.
- Elimating Competition - Now, up until this point, you've probably been saying to yourself... 'vote with your dollar' and choose to buy other products from more reputable companies. It's a nice idea and was even true during the middle of the past century when regulations were at their strongest. You could do that. Now, though, FFCA's broadened freedoms in the free market have allowed them to buy congressman to get new bad regulations written that keep startup companies from surviving long, allow FFCA to buy out or murder their local competitors, and otherwise ship as much of their operations as they can over state or even national borders in order to dodge as many of their responsibilities as they can. This results in greater freedom for FFCA to keep/make more money, but it takes away the consumer's freedom to have choices to pick from. Right now, due to de-regulation, America's media, health and health insurance, energy, telecommunications, and food industries are hyper-concentrated and set up in cartels and blocs in such as way as even when there are more than one choice (and in some cases there aren't), you only have a choice between bad and worse. We're talking anti-trust monopoly stuff here.
Government's role is meant to be as MODERATOR when different regions/entities come into dispute with one another due to having differing needs (urban vs. rural, corporate vs. consumer, etc etc etc), REFEREE in the market (such that the players in the market are playing by proper rules, unlike now), DISTRIBUTOR of common resources (in terms of making sure that the things everyone needs (roads, fire/police protection, arguably health, protection from invasion, disaster, et cetera) get to everyone who needs them), etc etc etc.
Ever since Reagan really kicked de-regulation into gear, CEOs' pay has increased 10 (or more) fold, going from getting about 40x more than their lowest paid employees to more than 400x more today... meanwhile, that employee has actually had their pay DECREASE in the face of inflation, has fewer benefits, has in some cases had pensions they've paid into disappear entirely, have had their unions (i.e., their ability to fight back against unfair working conditions) destroyed, have had their buying options reduced to different low-quality and probably defective brand-names made by the same monopolistic/cartel company, and their health severely impaired at the same time, and their freedom to choose to quit one job to seek a better one almost entirely eliminated. The 'free' market so vigorously espoused today has come at the cost of freedom for the worker and is recreating he kind of feudalistic atmosphere common in the middle ages and that lead to dramatic events like the french revolution (in which case a great many people will lose the freedom to stay alive (on both sides of the fiscal divide.))
I'm sorry, but while I understand your angst here, I'm afraid you may be doing the work of the freedom-destroyers for them. Regulations (good ones anyways) are the rules of the game... they are what make something like a football game (and a marketplace) function in a meaningful way. They are the commandments by which people understand one another, cooperate, and have the best opportunity to prosper without doing harm to someone else in the process.
(apologies for the novel. this topic is just that important.)