No. This should never be an excuse for finding a better solution because people would not want to look for it and because it is extremely difficult to undo a regulation put in place. You're saying regulation would work better than an independent audit? How so? Show me the mechanism.

Who's going to pay for an independent audit without regulation requiring it? They're clearly not doing it on their own currently.

I personally would be very much willing to pay for an audit of an exchange before I make the choice of which exchange to use. As many other Bitcoin traders. Who else do you think?

If I may ask, which exchange are you currently using, and what did your audit show?

There were no companies offering Bitcoin exchanges audit because the industry is very young. Expect those companies to appear (unless regulators start messing up with exchanges). If they don't appear, it means there's not enough demand. If there's no demand for audit and government is still trying to regulate the industry, it means they're wasting taxpayers money on something taxpayers don't want.

The only problem politics ever addresses is "how may I steal more from other people?"

So the tragedy of the commons, obscure forms of financial fraud, bank runs, and the marketing of addictive substances are examples of non-problems?

Politics is often about making bad problems worse.