No one cuts a corner unless they think they can get away with it, people aren't suicidal, or stupid. But most of the time they DO get away with it. This only reinforces the corner-cutter to try it again, it rewards him to get bolder each time, and to breed contempt for the regulators and safety people. That coal mine disaster in W Va is a perfect example. After a while a culture of automatic, sneering dismissal of all safety and health rules is established. It's just government interference in private freedom.

It is in the very nature of regulation that most of the time it is not necessary, but it is also the case that when it is ignored people die needlessly. That's not just a rule of thumb either, it is inevitable. Look at the coal mines in China, or for that matter, in the USA and Europe before the government and unions got involved in mine safety. Look at all industrial and product and safety regulation. The workplace used to be a very dangerous place.

Regulation certainly can be overdone, and it can be suborned and co-opted, and it sometimes gets way out of date or carried away too far, becoming an end in itself rather than a mechanism to do good. But that can be fixed.

On the other hand, a corporate or political culture that rejects it altogether gets people killed and gets people sick, or hurt. That cannot be fixed, and you can count on all regulation, good or bad, to be opposed, because it always costs money. This is why totalitarian governments often have such abysmal safety and environmental records. It isn't just a market that puts financial pressure on an industry to do more with less. Even state industries operate under the same economic forces, and they have the luxury to ignore all safety rules and protocols. So they do. People don't go to the trouble and expense of ensuring safety unless the incentive, financial or legal, is there. The pressure is always there to cut corners.

There has to be a price for poor safety, I realized that when I was in the service. The military is extremely safety-conscious, and is riddled with detailed and complex (often Byzantine!)safety regulations, because military life is inherently very dangerous, even in peacetime. I found out a ship at sea is always one mistake away from an industrial accident, and they happen frequently, in spite of heroic and conscientious efforts to prevent them.

I learned that safety precautions are NOT the result of government rules or laws, but have always been a feature of shipboard life and routine, since the days of sail. That this should be so in a service that puts itself deliberately in harm's way seems contradictory, until one realizes that captains need their crews, they were hard to replace underway, especially trained seamen; skippers are always short-handed and they cannot afford to lose men through accidents. There is a real cost for poor safety and dangerous working conditions.

But in the Gilded Age, the early Industrial Revolution, there was no shortage of desperate people who needed work. In many cases, there simply was no incentive to keep the workplace healthy and safe, in fact, it was just the opposite. It cost money. It took a long time to build up this culture of workplace safety we have today, a lot of people had to die needlessly, and a lot of people had to fight desperately to make it happen, because it was fiercely, even violently, resisted. The same goes for product safety and consumer protection too. It is the mark of a civilized society, we paid a stiff price for it, and we must never allow the old indifference to human life to creep back into the workplace.