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The rate of credit can be set by the market, and so can industry standards. Just because bureaucrats really think that they are improving the world because giving them power to do things is better than not doing things doesn't mean it's true.
The debate as to whether the Federal Reserve system magnifies or smoothens the business cycle and its crises is still wide open and the stranglehold of the FAA has so totally destroyed personal aviation that we don't have flying cars despite the technology having been widely available since the 1910s. You can insinue Milton Friedman was a crank, that doesn't make it true.
Bureaucrats want to be the ruling class, and their political formula is "the world is complex, so you need us experts to synthesize rules to handle that complexity, therefore we rule".
All well and good for bureaucrats. But like all political formulas, this is total bullshit. It's exactly as true as the divine right of kings. Which is to say that it's only politically true. And only inasmuch as the bureaucrats are good stewards of their imperium.
But it is plain to see now, to anyone with eyes, that they are terrible stewards.
Thus these empty boasts about the inherent need for the legions of bureaucrats and their superior claim to necessity ring as hollow as ever. No you don't need these people, in fact the chaos of their disappearance, however regrettable, would be a vast improvement over their continued rule.
The FAA has surely mangled personal aviation, but the lack of flying cars is probably better laid at the feet of the NHTSA. In order to be light enough to make any sense flying, flying vehicles have to be pretty fragile. Far too fragile for the NHTSA to approve letting them get in accidents at 70MPH on the interstate.
I haven't been continuing to follow it, but in the last decade and a half or so, I remember seeing a variety of start-ups make minor headlines about how they were getting into the flying car space. I always chuckled when I would dig into their materials and see that they were already claiming at the beginning that they'd be limited to something like 25-45MPH on the road. They're just not going to get a plethora of buyers with that type of restriction, even assuming they could make the rest of the product pretty decent and also survive FAA.
To eyeball some numbers, possibly the lightest passenger vehicle to barely squeek by highway safety standards would be the Smart Fortwo. The curb weight includes fluids, but was originally around 1600lbs. Eyeballing light aircraft (unfortunately, only listing empty weight), we'll start from that weight. After all, we've gotta add wings (eyeballing at least 150sqft of them; not sure where we're going to put them while driving), flying-to-driving-and-back-to-flying mechanisms, including shifting our powertrain to a propeller, flight control equipment, not sure if our suspension will survive landing, etc. Are we going to need STOL ability? Most potential flying car owners aren't gonna get hype about having to drive to their local airport anyway to take off... and then find another local airport to land. I think we're gonna need at least a couple hundred horsepower, but the Smart came with like 45-60hp to start (maybe 100hp later1, but it's not clear from the wiki article how much that affected the weight). But we're definitely going to get beefier, and that comes with additional powertrain weight, fuel weight, etc. Weight truly is the most predominant factor in aircraft design.
Maybe an Elon Musk tier person could thread the needle (and I guess he made comments to that effect in the last year), but I think it's still gonna be hard. I sort of doubt heavy batteries with an electric drivetrain is going to solve this problem, either.
1 - As an added note on the timeline for when technology existed, engines were much less efficient long ago.
The FAA wants very much to keep the number of pilots outside commercial aviation to a minimum. Which is why they have Nintendo-hard ("decode this 1950s aviation weather report about a typhoon. You have 10 seconds"... and that's for drone pilots too) and sometimes unwritten barriers (e.g. the rule that one must have the proper attitude towards authority) to doing so. NHTSA might make it hard to produce flying cars, but the FAA makes it impossible that they could ever catch on.
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