I recognize the impulse. Sometimes I feel it too. The burden of other people’s junk and the siren song of liberty. The idea that the human cost is too hard to measure against the bottom line.

And it’s argument has real merit. Too many rules do cut into our ability to innovate, create, and thrive.

For Christians, that line of thinking runs counter to the gospel, however. There, thriving comes from the freedom established by boundaries and the safety of the defined parameters.

And for all humans, creativity more often thrives with structure than without.

When we talk about protections and regulations, we’re always talking about freedoms, rules, and order. This may be the central territory over the public debate about them. But it isn’t the whole playing field. Just part of it.

The other part of the playing field is the human cost these protections are trying to eliminate. The cost to workers, the environment, and the public. It is measured in health, well-being, and lifestyle. And we can collect data of our health and the crud we’re dumping into the water supply to see how well we’re doing.

In the narrow view of the playing field, we see only dollars and cents. Or more precisely, the transactional bookkeeping of corporations and small businesses. Costs are only measured according to their ledger. Not the people’s. It excludes the human cost.

By playing this game only on one corner of the playing field, we’re directly pitting human lives against costs to profit.

There are reasons why we regulate industries.

There are several real reasons why we regulate industries and put public safety measures into place, but one really important one: We don’t otherwise.

Without the help of government, we wouldn’t act.

Toward the end of President Obama’s second term, a new standard was enacted regulating the silica produced on construction sites.

We’ve known for some 80 years of the danger of silica. And yet it took 40 years to put in a meager regulation to protect workers from inhaling this deadly carcinogenic substance. And then another 40 to reduce the accepted level to a standard which will protect human lives.

During those 80 years, we waited for the magic jazz hands of the market to wave a wand and make it just work {poof!}. They didn’t. Because our mindset doesn’t factor all of the costs.

And neither did the construction industry fix the problem themselves. They didn’t self-regulate or create a new model to make the regulation obsolete.

The industry had nearly a century to figure out how to deal with the problem and protect its own workers. There was no law stopping them. Instead, they spent that time fighting the protections which would save the lives of their workers and protect their own bottom line from healthcare costs and work days missed.

To exclude the human cost is a dishonest debate.

I do get why many people think we have too many regulations. There are scientific reasons why rules may prevent us from doing what we would do on our own. And I often advocate for a leaner approach to small groups which gather monthly.

But protections and regulations aren’t burdensome for the employee who gets overtime pay when she actually works it. And it isn’t burdensome to me when I turn on the tap and get water that isn’t poisoned.

They aren’t only burdens to industry. They are direct benefits to people who live here now and in the future.

This vision of protections and regulations as only burdens and unnecessary rules meant to drive down the economy is evidentially and demonstrably untrue. The very thesis is predicated on a narrow cost-benefit analysis which obscures the real intentions.

In other words, it’s a ruse.

To argue against all regulations as the evil spawn of satan narrows the playing field, ignores the true costs, the human cost, and shows a shocking ignorance of the variety of protections and regulations the government uses to maintain public safety.

It’s a perpetual strawman argument in which “Government” is always the answer to the question “What is the problem?”.

That isn’t honest. But we also know that this isn’t really about protections and regulations. This isn’t the actual argument. It’s really about hatred of government.

It’s like arguing that you hate the color orange and need to get rid of all that is orange. But really you hate giving out candy to strangers and can’t stand Halloween. So the best way to go after Halloween is rid the country of orange.

We argue over ideology without regard for the fundamental purpose of what the government actually is.

Government is simply the way we order ourselves.

That’s the accepted definition. That’s the historic definition. And living in a democratic republic predicated on maintaining that togetherness while supporting our individual liberty has been our common purpose for over two centuries.

We don’t all agree that the government is a problem and needs to be gutted. Or that local communities know better than others. Or that there is only one way to approach the constitutional suppositions of our federal government. I reject those as presuppositions.

Some may see government regulations as the true mortal sin of government, pushed upon us all by “experts” who don’t know any better. But believing that isn’t objectively true. In fact, most opposition to specific regulations relies on the expertise of corporations, while denying the expertise of nearly any other group.

We are our government.

And we use protections and regulations to conserve and protect our people and resources.

We put protections in place to do what industries, states, communities, and groups almost never choose to do on their own: protect the rights and safety of workers, the environment, and the future well-being of our people. They aren’t stupid and meaningless.

And the expertise which went into their crafting most of our protections and regulations is as valid, if not more valid than the expertise of the corporate elites and individualists who rail against them.

Delaying or removing protections like this one, which would protect workers from silica, lead to the deaths of hundreds of workers. If we don’t fit this into the measuring equation, then the entire argument around the rule of law is fundamentally dishonest. It isn’t just about money and single transactions.

And if we decide it is, and we choose to allow industries to knowingly endanger their workers, then we must deal with the fact that we had a choice to protect people over profits and chose not to.

Or worse.

We chose not to see the human cost, the lives, health, and safety, as an actual cost, rendering the sanctity of life worth literally nothing.