If you are unfamiliar with it, that was Gores response when challenged to explain why he used (a lot of) soft money during the 2000 campaign even as the Clinton administration pushed to restrict soft money: It is unethical but legal, and competitors will continue using it so long as that remains true, so idealistically refusing to follow suit only disadvantages oneself without reforming the system. Ironically, the same type of argument often discourages companies from ceasing unscrupulous behavior that is the industry norm: If it is legal to dump toxic waste in the nearest river, a company subjecting itself to the expense of responsible disposal only incurs a cost not born by its competitors without improving industry standards at all. The argument is obviously very self-serving, and industries lobbying for regulations against alternatives undermine the larger industry argument against all regulation in much the same way Gore undercut his argument against soft money.

Consequently, while industries do occasionally push for greater regulations on each other (irrespective of my inability to recall a specific instance,) I contend that is the exception rather than the rule. When it does occur, it is invariably a case of an industry flexing its inherent power via government means; removing the government means would preserve that power, which would continue being employed in the myriad other forms already extant. beetnemesis core premise (or rather, the one linked) that government is simply a tool for enacting regulations on behalf of corporations, and that restricting the former would thus restrict the latter, is unsound. The best evidence for that is, once again (and as you well know,) that the principal critics of government regulation are those same corporations. That they on occasion use their lobbyist influence to target each other in no way lessens their general hatred of regulation or the enthusiasm with which they would abolish it entirely if they could.

The caveat to that is that large corporations HAVE been able to abolish enforcement against any industry large enough to finance a lobby, and there the argument has more merit. Small businesses are very much burdened by regulation, often unfairly, because they lack the immunity their larger competitors enjoy. Those businesses obvoiusly do not lobby for regulations of any kind, because they lack the surplus capital to lobby for anything, which is precisely the problem. Essentially, they meet the regulatory burden large corporations shirk in much the way the middle class meets the taxation burden the upper class shirks. In both cases, the groups evading their legal responsibilities can therefore easily convince those who cannot evade them that no such responsibility should exist, but in neither case does the ability of a small powerful elite to ignore the law validate their contention that the law itself is wrong.