There is another more indirect trade-off. A more prosperous society will have better medicine, safer transportation, more durable housing, and less dangerous work. Thus, anything that reduces people's incomes is likely to, at the margin, make people less safe. Yet today the government regularly regulates as if money were free and there were no health trade-off. Common are the government rules that cost more than they are worth.
Many rules offer dramatically worse deals.
The formaldehyde rules cause 1,600 times as much harm as good. Shanahan and Thierer suggest another way of looking at the so-called opportunity cost of these controls. The dichloropropane rule costs the equivalent of 4,353 fire trucks. And pharmaceutical companies could develop 331 new drugs for the money necessary to save one person with the formaldehyde restrictions. Bargains these regulations are not.