I can’t tell if you are being sarcastic, so I will assume that you are not.

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First of all, nobody is arguing about going back to the “golden age” of industry. You have indulged in the false dichotomy of either “19th century regulations or current OSHA standards.” That isn’t a choice, and nobody is going to make it. We live in a very different, and dare I say, better era. Never mind OSHA for a second. The advent of cellphones, Twitter, Facebook, etc. will prevent us from returning to your “golden age.”

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“Corporate responsibility” is a thing now. People influence business with their feet and their dollars. A KFC supplier gets caught by PETA kicking chickens on camera and there is a huge public outcry, KFC gets boycotted, there are protests. The supplier gets cut off, the management gets fired, workers are retrained.

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Imagine the outcry if a mine collapsed in the US and workers were buried, their bodies laid out days later for collection. Now imagine the Twitter accounts of all the wives of the trapped miners crying out for help. Imagine the protests and Facebook posts about how evil the coal company is for not rescuing its miners. Imagine CNN showing cellphone video camera photos of the recovered bodies. Tell me that a company would allow that to happen? We saw the difference in recovery between Exxon Valdez and BP Deepwater Horizon. BP did a lot (yes they could have done more) to maintain good optics, because people were boycotting and protesting BP stations over that.

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With what I said in mind, I am not suggesting the removal of all safety regulations. Neither would I allow anybody to mix up piss and ink and call it a drug or buy a first aid kit and call themselves a surgeon. What I meant to convey is that risk takers need to have the liberty to take the risks they feel safe taking. Regulations can be good when they offer protection, but at the same time, they can be bad if they hinder growth.

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We could completely eliminate risk of concussions in football if we made the sport non-contact, but that would be boring. So we accept some risk (players getting hurt) and employ some risk avoidance (approved helmets and padding). It’s easy to get tempted to make everything safe, but the cost of doing that is the loss of innovation.

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We killed three astronauts in Apollo 1. That was a tragedy. Those men were heroes and were buried with honors. But we sucked it up, and on July 20, 1969 two Americans set foot on the moon. Today, I’m not so sure we would have gone to the moon. Had Apollo 1 happened in 2007, the current climate would have demanded that Congress act and the mission to the moon might very well have been delayed infinitely if not canceled outright. That would be an ever greater tragedy.

What about the hundreds of thousands of employees killed inside coal mines in northern PA during this “golden age”. Their bodies are kept inside the mines until the shift would end, then they would be drug out and their corpse placed on the door step of their “employee housing” for their loved ones to see and claim your body for burial rights with a note attached. This note would state that they have 48 hours to leave so that they could get new tenants in that were able to work the mines. Just look up labor conditions during the industrial revolution. But no lets just ignore the fact that CEOs and President’s don’t want to cut into their large profit margins because Pompous Joe the III can’t afford his 27th Ferrari then. Or companies laying off thousands and the CEO gives himself a half a million dollar bonus and 200k salary increase. The true culprit here are standards and regulations put into place to protect workers and workplace conditions, no not the greedy corporate, no that wouldn’t make any sense at all. Those darn regulations and workplace standards are holding us back! If only the Unites States were more like China, then we could REALLY get somewhere with some fancy monuments, maybe even with the faces of our precious corporate elites carved into them like the gods of ancient greece.