Please bear in mind that regulations were put in place to prevent lassez faire (the policy of just letting the market run its course at the expense of the consumer which does not actually 'lift populations out of poverty' as you claim). It generally pushes a 'what the market will bear' mentality over a 'what the customers can afford' one.
Paul Krugman, social democrat, Nobel Prize winning economist, NYT columnist, academic luminary, disagrees with you.
Do you think that he is wrong?
"Workers in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say “inevitably” because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers’) health; they will of course try to pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And in many cases these are still extremely poor countries."
"Yet in those countries where the new export industries took root, there has been unmistakable improvement in the lives of ordinary people. Partly this is because a growing industry must offer its workers a somewhat higher wage than they could get elsewhere just in order to get them to move. More important, however, the growth of manufacturing, and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector created, had a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land became less intense, so rural wages rose; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrank, so factories started to compete with one another for workers, and urban wages also began to rise. In countries where the process has gone on long enough—say, in South Korea or Taiwan—wages have reached advanced-country levels. (In 1975 the average hourly wage in South Korea was only 5 percent of that in the United States; by 2006 it had risen to 62 percent.)
"The benefits of export-led economic growth to the mass of people in the newly industrializing economies were not a matter of conjecture. A place like Indonesia is still so poor that progress can be measured in terms of how much the average person gets to eat; between 1968 and 1990 per capita intake rose from 2,000 to 2,700 calories a day, and life expectancy rose from forty-six years to sixty-three. Similar improvements could be seen throughout the Pacific Rim, and even in places like Bangladesh. These improvements did not take place because well-meaning people in the West did anything to help—foreign aid, never large, shrank in the 1990s to virtually nothing. Nor was it the result of the benign policies of national governments, which, as we were soon to be forcefully reminded, were as callous and corrupt as ever. It was the indirect and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinational corporations and rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage of the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It was not an edifying spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the result was to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to something that was in some cases still awful but nonetheless significantly better.
"And once again, capitalism could with considerable justification claim the credit. . . ."
-- Krugman, Paul. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (p. 26). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition
