From Sunday's NYT front page:

A formal government inquiry into the fire has just begun. But interviews with tenants, industry executives and fire safety engineers point to a gross failure of government oversight, a refusal to heed warnings from inside Britain and around the world and a drive by successive governments from both major political parties to free businesses from the burden of safety regulations.

Promising to cut “red tape,” business-friendly politicians evidently judged that cost concerns outweighed the risks of allowing flammable materials to be used in facades. Builders in Britain were allowed to wrap residential apartment towers — perhaps several hundred of them — from top to bottom in highly flammable materials, a practice forbidden in the United States and many European countries. And companies did not hesitate to supply the British market.

For years, members of Parliament had written letters requesting new restrictions on cladding, especially as the same flammable facades were blamed for fires in Britain, France, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and elsewhere. Yet British authorities resisted new rules. A top building regulator explained to a coroner in 2013 that requiring only noncombustible exteriors in residential towers “limits your choice of materials quite significantly.”

...

Business-friendly governments in Britain — first under Labor and then under the Conservatives — campaigned to pare back regulations. ****A 2005 law known as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order ended a requirement for government inspectors to certify that buildings had met fire codes, and shifted instead to a system of self-policing.**** Governments adopted slogans calling for the elimination of at least one regulation for each new one that was imposed, and the authorities in charge of fire safety took this to heart.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/world/europe/grenfell-tower-london-fire.html

So, not only did the British government fail to ban the cladding--as had been done in the US and other European countries--for buildings over a certain height. They actually DID AWAY WITH INSPECTIONS in favor of "self-policing."

Regulations don't just fall out of the sky to land on some luckless entrepreneur's head and keep him from realizing his dreams of untold wealth. We have building codes for a reason: So that the people living in those buildings are less likely to die in a fire or have the building collapse on top of them. As a society, we've decided that the additional cost to the developer is worth it to live in a habitable building that isn't a death trap.

The same goes for things like traffic laws or health codes for restaurants. Sure, "everybody knows" you're supposed to drive on the right side of the road. We need the law in place because you know for a fact some overentitled dumbass would be causing head-on collisions by driving in the wrong lane just because "there's no law against it." Yes, safe food handling rules are a pain to follow. But it shouldn't be a matter of life and death to head to the local eatery and play food-poisoning roulette. What's that? The free market would soon put a restaurant out of business that kills too many of its patrons with tainted food? Well, that would be a blow to a crooked restaurateur who would just set up another establishment a couple of blocks away under a different name. Meanwhile, the bodies pile up, but that's the price of liberty!

Business regulations that we always favor, and the they, the pukes are always against......says so much about us and them...oh..those regulations save ...lives...

even thinking about the consequences of what would happen without them. Maybe they will learn something (fool that I am, still!) from this tragic fire, and understand a regulatory system is in place to protect the public and look after their health and safety against those villains who are only interested in making more money by transferring the risks away from themselves and forcing in downward on the lesser folk who cannot fight back.

The industry will self correct any day now.

They made the decision to refurbish on the cheap