> I appreciate that child labor have been regulated out of the greedy hands of our capitalist overlords.

Child labour ended because of capitalism. The increased income and power that begets then allowed for child labour laws to come in - it certainly didn't happen in pre-industrial societies or capitalists wouldn't have been able to employ them in the first place. Same goes for slavery, not only did economic pressure from increasing automation make it less viable but the increased wealth and power of people within society who were opposed to it meant slavery was finally ended by the most capitalistic societies the world has ever seen.

Capitalists didn't end child labor. In fact they opposed banning child labor. Had the governments not banned it, it would probably still be legal.

This is simply not true. The UK parliament - at the time the most industrialised nation on Earth and possibly the country in which it started - was entirely stocked with land owners, all of whom would be working that land and reinvesting into it, along with many owners of factories. Owning land was a prerequisite to voting, let alone being an MP.

John Fielden[1][2], one of the most notable social reformers, especially for factory workers, was the owner of a mill:

> On his father’s death in 1811, Fielden and his brothers inherited the family cotton-spinning business at Todmorden, which became one of the greatest manufacturing concerns in Great Britain. Unlike most mill owners, Fielden soon became a supporter of legislation to protect factory labour.

So we can see that any them and us is a false dilemma and hence, not true. Not only that, even with opposition from "most mill owners", reforms still went through (even though some MPs at times slowed it or watered down some of the reforms).

So, capitalists in a capitalist society did indeed do what no other societies had done before. As Fieldsen notes in his The Curse of the Factory System:

> Here, then, is the "curse" of our factory system: as improvements in machinery have gone on, the "avarice of masters" has prompted many to exact more labour from their hands than they were fitted by nature to perform, and those who have wished for the hours of labour to be less for all ages than the legislature would even yet sanction, have had no alternative but to conform more or less to the prevailing practice, or abandon the trade altogether

Human greed is not limited to capitalists, but the reforms were.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Fielden

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fielden

Edit: typo and, of course, formatting. Why can't we get an editor, dear HN?

Yes, my statement was very broad. But the point I'm trying to make is that regulation is usually reductive, not additive. It is definitely needed in many cases, and the state should interfere when necessary to ensure safety and fairness. But regulation is never the reason innovation happens.

The spirit of the author's comment was that if you regulate for something becoming compelling, it would become compelling. That never happens. You can't regulate your way to being innovative. I think it was Ben Evans who said the difference between the US and EU is that the US sees regulation as necessary evil, while the EU sees it as an exciting project. Hence the different outcomes.