"My first thought was one persons slippery slope is another persons steady progress."

Exactly!!!

This is no different than the "slippery slope" of government safety regulations that automobiles go through. Over the decades cars have become more and more safe as the government mandated seatbelts, airbags, gas tank construction requirements, and frame/structure requirements to how the car crumbles in a crash.

Leave it to the free market to figure out? Uh, doesn't work. Most people simply do not have the time/expertise/resources to determine what makes cars safer and what car models have those safety features. Gradual government regulation was required to make cars more and more safe. It was literally government protecting its citizens. Isn't that the role of government?

"There are many areas where the free market has failed us and sensible regulations are a tremendous benefit."

I never understood the knee-jerk anti-regulation crowd. Whenever I hear a politician saying they will go in office and slash hundreds or thousands of regulations I know he is just pandering to an ill informed, unthinking knee-jerk crowd. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind a politician making a case for specific regulations to be cut (if they can explain why), there should always be debate over what regulations are sensible or not. But to say they are going to willy nilly cut regulations in a generic sense is just pandering. Whenever I hear a politician say that, I wish a reporter would ask the follow up question of "What regulations? Are you talking about the regulations that prevent companies from putting arsenic in our food?"

Of course, the people these politicians are pandering to are also the same people who will be the first to yell and scream when a railroad that is legally carrying toxic chemicals on a legal railcar has an accident and derails in their subdivision.

It is perfectly reasonable to have a debate on the sensibility of regulations. It also should be recognized that there is oftentimes a tradeoff when deciding upon regulations and different people might fall into different camps on those tradeoffs. For example, we can make driving a car even more safe if we wanted to, but that would require laws that would make cars much more expensive, to own/drive or too cumbersome to be met (like making licensing requirements so tough that only a small percentage of the public could meet them). So it is fine to argue over the tradeoffs of the costs of increased safety versus the marginal risk it would mitigate. I get all of that. But that is not what the knee-jerk anti regulation people are doing.

Take the OP in this thread for example. He obviously doesn't like the light bulb regulations. Fine. He doesn't say why he is against these regulations other than they are government regulations (just like the regulations on arsenic in food come are government regulations). He isn't arguing about the sensibility of the regulations he is simple arguing against them because they are government mandated.

Bizarre and inconsistent logic.