Bret: Building safety is a core responsibility of government, assuming it’s competently and honestly executed. I lived through a horrific earthquake in Mexico City in 1985, which at the time had some of the most stringent building codes in the world. They didn’t help because too many buildings, including dozens of public schools and hospitals, had been cheaply built in violation of the codes. Rules are good only if they are sensible, affordable — and enforced.

Gail: I would barge in here and point out that good enforcement requires government funding, but that’d just be cranky. Plus it’s your turn. Go on.

Bret: On health care, the libertarian conceit that health care is just another marketplace where consumers can make their own choices according to their own tastes and budgets, as they might at Whole Foods or Walmart, is silly. The real problem is that, as with buildings, it’s hard to define the upper limit of how much safety — or health — we want, especially when it comes at the expense of other goods: affordability, availability, experimentation, innovation and so on.

Notice I’m avoiding the elephant in this chamber, so to speak.

Gail: How did you feel about that government-efficiency order Trump signed calling for doing away with two regulations every time a new one was implemented? I’m stacking the deck here, given that it was based on a British model that could well have been one of the reasons there was no rule on retrofitting apartment sprinklers.

Bret: I liked that executive order — one of the very few things for which I’ve ever praised Trump. Maybe it’s Procrustean, but I’m hard-pressed to think there weren’t two outdated U.K. regulations that could have been retired for the sake of installing fire sprinklers in older housing projects. The license fee for the privilege of watching TV in black-and-white, for instance?

Gail: You may have more faith in bureaucracy than I do. I wouldn’t want to bet everything on officials having the energy to change the status quo and retract two rules that somebody somewhere probably has a stake in keeping on the books.