Regulations help big companies, but no regulation helps big companies even more. Just imagine the profits you could make if you could save on safety inspections or workers rights.
Have you ever worked in a large corporation? Many of us who have, are convinced that without massive state interference on their behalf they couldn't survive at all. A corporation might be set up so that one sort of regularly-needed thing might happen quickly and efficiently, but every other sort of thing requires massive coordination among non-cooperative parties. Shit takes forever. Large firms are quite concerned with getting just the regulations they want, not no regulations at all. Fortunately for them we have a society in which they are well-placed to designate exactly those regulations they desire.
There is a term, "economy of scale", that makes a certain sense when applied to some factory-based manufacture of commodities. Rather than be restricted to that particular field in which it is valid, this term is a shibboleth used by Economist writers and their dupes to hamper any critical examination of anything a corporation might do.
I have, in fact, worked in a large corporation and I agree that regulations are a big reason why they survive. I just don't think that no regulation at all is the better alternative. I wish I knew how to prevent big corporations writing their own regulations, but for many topics most people who know anything about it are on their payroll.
You think that long-after-the-fact punishments that require long-term planning would have an effect?
We have evidence that even the most severe punishment of all does not work as a deterrent (example link: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/study-88-criminologists-do-not-...). Or smoking, where knowing how bad it is seems to have little to no effect (even doctors do it).
Even if people did act completely rationally, a dollar earned today is worth much more than dollars lost tomorrow even without inflation. And how many expensive and useless mergers have been performed even when the executives and even the top stock owners knew it was a bad strategy long-term? They just sold their stake and let somebody else deal with the fallout.
So even with complete rationality, detaching punishment from the "crime" (in time) gives people time to get in the harvest and move on before punishment occurs, making it useless as a deterrent (given that, as linked above, it does not even work when people cannot detach themselves from facing the ultimate punishment it's even worse).
If you want insurance to take the role of regulation you quickly end up with certification programs that are necessary to get any insurance. Those programs are just regulations in disguise that are divorced from any democratic process for changing them. If you want to rely on litigation you face the problem that big companies can afford armies of lawyers that can delay rulings until the injured party runs out of funds or fighting will.
