The regulations are written in blood

A while back I was reading stuff on the internet, as I was prone to do, and on a forum I frequent I ran across a story that has stuck with me.

The person making the post had been working as a safety inspector for the federal government, specifically as regards to cargo ships. One day while he was relatively new, he and another coworker of his, also new, were going through the manual of regulations that they were supposed to enforce, and laughing at the ridiculous ones, one consisted of very firm instructions not to store hazardous chemicals in the same rooms that the sailors bunk. "Of course you don't store chemicals there!" They said, "why would you even need to say that?"

Their supervisor, who had been at this for a long time, looked at them and said "the safety regulations are written in blood."

At the ground level, one of the arguments in favor of reducing the powers of the government is that those regulations, among others, stifle creativity and reduce the ability of companies to make money. This might actually be true, however proponents of stripping those regulations never tell you about why they got instituted in the first place.

They are written in blood.

The government isn't really a proactive institution, it does things in response to events, not in anticipation of them, that regulation about storing hazardous chemicals safely came about because at some point, someone decided to save a few dollars and store toxic waste or whatever in the same place their sailors slept, and someone, probably several or many someones, died.

It takes only the barest knowledge of American history to know that given the slightest provocation the rich will literally murder the poor if it will save them a buck or two. I know the definition of literally has changed to include figuratively now so I will be clear, I mean that rich people explicitly, knowingly, and intentionally put their poor employees to work in environments that would kill them because that was cheaper than making those environments safe to work in.

They would dearly love to do so today, in the name of freedom to innovate or some bullshit.

It extends beyond workplace safety of course, virtually every limit on the powers of corporations or big money were instituted because people died, or their lives were ruined and then they died. In our lifetime we have seen that with Dodd-Frank as a response to the Recession, and even now those restrictions are being vigorously fought against because they "limit growth" Never mind that even with the last week of downturn we are still in the strongest period of stock market growth, the only kind those people care about, in our nations history.

Those regulations too are written in blood.

 It's not an intellectual exercise or about arbitrarily limiting what "innovators" can do, it is quite simply and literally about keeping people alive. You should view efforts to remove regulations of almost any sort with alarm because they are there for a reason, someone probably died for them to be made, we should not be having those fights again.