"Why should the government tell me I need this many exits, or that I need a wheelchair ramp if no-one needs it?"
"Because you're too short-sighted to see how important those things are. The government is watching out for you and those unfortunate enough to know you."
1. Fire sprinklers were added to the IRC and IBC due to their ability to prevent fires (surprise!), in light of the fact that costs have come down significantly, and they can now make them look "not ugly".
Fires aren't just going to damage your building, they'll damage the stuff you don't own as well.
2. The number and placement of fire exits is usually based on the distance one has to travel from any given occupied space, and the occupancy of the building. This distance is determined based on real numbers like how far you are likely to get before smoke inhalation kills you.
Letting the probably non-existent free market sort this out by "the people who didn't die" learning to only frequent places that have sufficient fire exits seems like a bad strategy.
3. You probably don't remember the wonderful days before the ADA, when there weren't many wheelchair ramps, and people with wheelchairs were basically told to "suck it" everywhere they went (including, in some cases, government buildings).
To verify, you realize that the person you are responding to, whom I believe you have called a "troll", seems to quite clearly understand this, right? The first quote is "what a lot of people are saying", and the second quote is "the obvious response to that".
Additionally, fire kills people, as does the voluminous smoke it gives off.
Fire exits are required to make sure people can exit a burning building within 3-7 minutes (varies by jurisdiction). This is based on an unfortunate history of tragedies involving people dying in fires, in which it was discovered that people who did not manage to escape in the first few minutes usually succumbed to the smoke.
I actually can kind of understand a wheel chair ramp. You will never need it if you don't have one, because nobody with a wheel chair will ever come. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to be in a wheelchair and kept out of so many places.
The rest? Most of it sounds like a combination of people wanting to believe nothing bad can ever happen to them and the nanny state wanting to keep itself employed.
As the new mother of a 3 month old, I'm really getting a taste of how much it must suck to be in a wheelchair. The stroller can't go into half the places I try to visit. Even the bank wasn't wheelchair accessible. And in many stores, even if they are on the ground floor, the aisles are too narrow to navigate.
"Why should the government tell me I need this many exits, or that I need a wheelchair ramp if no-one needs it?"
"Because you're too short-sighted to see how important those things are. The government is watching out for you and those unfortunate enough to know you."