I think you both have too extreme positions. There is a strong need for regulations, since otherwise the strongest firm will be able to capture the whole market. Think Standard Oil or the Russian oligarchs of the 90s. On the other hand the regulation should not prevent innovation by protecting vested interests. As you have mentioned. In that case it isn't just capturing the bureaucracy it itself has a strong interest in keeping the regulations intact or otherwise it would cease to exist, and careers would be shattered.

Also keep in mind that there are very different kinds of regulations. Some forms of regulation are extremely important to keep the battle ground level like net neutrality, various monopoly regulations. Patents are the opposite since they prevent firms from entering a market, because they have the goal of incentivising research. This type of regulations can become very anti free market very quickly since it can keep firms that don't have bargaining patents from producing competitively if the duration of the patents isn't chosen wisely and the quality of research needed is set to low. Still, they are important if they are designed with their original purpose in mind of making sure that a company can recop the research capital spent. The US has strolled far from that path, and now patents are a keep the competition out of the market forever tool.

Some regulation may just outlive its original purpose. Taxi regulation made a lot of sense in the past. It was designed to install entry barriers to protect consumers in a market, where there were none. Think back to a time before navigation. You want the taxi driver to know your city by heart, because otherwise the consumer is going to have a horrible experience, which the free market cannot solve, since he will just take the next taxi available, so even if the free market is capable of eliminating terrible taxi drivers within a few years the low barriers would have lead to a constant inflow of more people without the necessary knowledge. Of course times and technology have changed, so the regulation lost its purpose and should be ended, but that doesn't make it a bad regulation when it was invented.

Smart regulation is what is needed. The problem is that the politicians proclaiming that have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.

So let me be the first to call for regulation that sets high entry barriers into the political system. So, we "consumers" aren't bothered with drivers that have never taken the time to learn the maps - or politicians that have no clue what they are talking about.