Comment by bluGill

The conflict here is it costs a lot of effort (time and money) to do the hard work of figuring out what a good code should be. Used to be large cities (New York) would pay for it, and small towns would copy it - which meant if you lived in a smaller city you were freeloading off of New York (and in some cases you had to do something that made sense for New York but not where you were) which is unfair to New York's taxpayers. By have some organization create a standard towns can more equally share the cost of building a good standard.

Standards organizations need to pay the engineers who do all the complex calculations to figure out what works. However I think everyone agrees the law shouldn't be hidden from people who need to obey it.