Driving down the New York State Thruway on a warm Sunday afternoon this April, my wife and I were discussing plans for a grandson’s visit when, out of nowhere, a steel tube with a knobby end came flying up from the pavement, headed straight for us. We both thought we were dead.

The missile punched two tennis-ball-size craters in the windshield of my new car, sprinkling us with glass. But the windshield held. Because of that, we are alive — shaken but unharmed.

We were relieved and joyful. After we phoned 911 so the steel could be cleared off the road, we voiced our appreciation for consumer advocate Ralph Nader, whose selfless devotion to his fellow Americans and his success in getting government to require safer cars has saved more than a million lives so far.

The government rule that saved us grew from the 1959 deaths of some friends of Nader in a car built with misnamed “safety” glass. Nader discovered that Detroit knew how to build safer cars. The freshly minted Harvard lawyer set out to get regulations requiring seat belts, stronger door latches and heat-tempered glass with the strength and integrity to repel a steel missile in a 65-mile-per-hour impact.

But Nader’s work and the benefits of smart regulation are being lost and forgotten in our time, a lesson brought home to me a week later as I showed my third grandson, Jack, the new windshield in my Volkswagen CC.

At 14, Jack is already preparing to earn a doctorate in chemistry, with a heavy dose of philosophy on the side. But as well read as he is, he had never heard of Nader. Jack had no idea how we got seat belts, though he knew cars did not always have them. He was unaware that steering columns, which used to impale drivers in crashes, now collapse or that car radios and heaters once had big metal buttons that kneecapped occupants.

In 21st century America “regulation” is an epithet wielded by politicians in both parties as they seek votes by promising to shrink our government in the belief this makes us free.

Nader’s successes making products safer, jobs less dangerous and government information more available almost all took place in the 1960s and 1970s, before the conservative turn to the current political age, the Age of Reagan. While the framers had us imbue our government with powers for six noble purposes laid out in the preamble to the Constitution, including promoting the general welfare, Reaganism portrays government as the problem and regulation as an enemy of freedom — though no one is quite so heartless or foolish as to argue that we should have the freedom to die by dangerous windshield.

Societies, economies and technology are dynamic. As conditions change, so must regulations. Yet because politicians speak of regulation as synonymous with “bad,” our government’s duty to promote the general welfare slips further and further as necessary regulatory changes are stymied and moneyed interests write the rules for their own benefit.