If I told you that gov­ern­ment offi­cials pos­sessed iron­clad proof that an immi­nent threat to this nation had the capac­i­ty to cre­ate a 9/​11’s worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annu­al eco­nom­ic cost of a quar­ter tril­lion dol­lars, ask your­self: Would you say we should do some­thing about it?

The reaction would be swift - negligent federal agencies would be roundly criticized and the specific state's lax attitude toward security would be lambasted.

I’m guess­ing you would. Out of a basic sense of patri­o­tism, you would prob­a­bly at min­i­mum sup­port some new secu­ri­ty reg­u­la­tions and invest­ments in enforc­ing those reg­u­la­tions, even if that meant pay­ing slight­ly high­er tax­es. After all, you pro­fess to love Amer­i­ca, and that’s the least we should do in the face of such a threat to our coun­try, right?

Now ask your­self: Would your response to the orig­i­nal query change if you dis­cov­ered that the threat at hand was not from a ter­ror­ist, but from unsafe work­places — and that because of that unad­dressed prob­lem, these casu­al­ties and costs have already become a fact of life in Amer­i­ca? Come on, admit it — your response prob­a­bly would change. Yes, many who would reflex­ive­ly sup­port more reg­u­la­tions and enforce­ment in the face of a for­eign ter­ror­ist threat would sud­den­ly scoff at more reg­u­la­tions and enforce­ment in the face of unsafe work­places. Why the dou­ble standard?

That’s the trou­bling ques­tion raised by the reac­tion — or, real­ly, lack there­of — to last mon­th’s cat­a­stroph­ic explo­sion in West, Texas.

Occur­ring in the heart of a nation whose gov­ern­ment data doc­u­ments 4,500 work­place deaths every year, the dead­ly blast orig­i­nat­ed at a fer­til­iz­er plant that had not been inspect­ed by the chron­i­cal­ly under­fund­ed Occu­pa­tion­al Safe­ty and Health Admin­is­tra­tion since 1985.

The loca­tion of the plant is par­tic­u­lar­ly sig­nif­i­cant. As the New York Times reports, Texas pro­motes an ​“antipa­thy toward reg­u­la­tions” as ​“the only state that does not require com­pa­nies to con­tribute to work­ers’ com­pen­sa­tion cov­er­age” and a place where many coun­ties ​“cite the lack of local fire codes as a rea­son for com­pa­nies to move there.”

As a result, Texas is not the nation’s most pop­u­lous state but nonethe­less sports ​“the nation’s high­est num­ber of work­place fatal­i­ties.” When it comes to indus­tri­al dis­as­ters, the Times notes that Texas has only about a quar­ter more ​“high risk” sites than the state (Illi­nois) with the sec­ond most num­ber of such facil­i­ties. How­ev­er, it has, accord­ing to the Times, ​“more than three times the num­ber of acci­dents, four times the num­ber of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the prop­er­ty dam­age costs” as that state.

If all this data was about a ter­ror­ist threat, the reac­tion would be swift — neg­li­gent fed­er­al agen­cies would be round­ly crit­i­cized and the spe­cif­ic state’s lax atti­tude toward secu­ri­ty would be lam­bast­ed. Yet, after the fer­til­iz­er plant explo­sion, there has been no proac­tive reac­tion at all, oth­er than Texas Repub­li­can Gov. Rick Per­ry boast­ing about his state’s ​“com­fort with the amount of over­sight” that already exists.

So, again, why the dis­crep­an­cy? Sim­ply put, because this is what now pass­es for accept­able in a dereg­u­lat­ed econ­o­my whose laws are writ­ten by cor­po­rate interests.

Those inter­ests are hos­tile to safe­ty reg­u­la­tion and enforce­ment because they don’t want to spend even a tiny bit more on mak­ing work­sites secure for employ­ees. So they, and the politi­cians whose cam­paigns they fund, have made an epi­thet out of the word ​“reg­u­la­tion” in order to guar­an­tee that almost nobody asks whether we have to tol­er­ate 4,500 dead Amer­i­can work­ers each year.

We don’t have to tol­er­ate that lev­el of work­place car­nage, of course. There are many obvi­ous and con­struc­tive things we could do, start­ing with adding resources to reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies and beef­ing up work­place enforce­ment. But if even a blast as big as the one in West, Texas can­not make us real­ize that sim­ple fact, then noth­ing will.