Speaker John Boehner blasts “job-crushing regulations.” The House majority leader, Eric Cantor, prefers a variant: “job-destroying regulations.” That mantra has been repeated so much that we might think that all regulations do is crush, destroy, annihilate, maim, gut, crucify and extirpate jobs.

Yet think about Amber Rose, a 16-year-old girl in Maryland who was driving a General Motors car (way too fast, while drunk) with an ignition switch the company knew was faulty. She struck a tree and, because the ignition fault had switched off the electrical system, the air bag didn’t deploy. Amber was killed.

While G.M. says that 13 people died in connection with the faulty switches, a consumer group called the Center for Auto Safety says it has found 303 such deaths. G.M. has said it knew about this problem for a decade. It even devised a fix but chose not to implement it because of the cost, which would have been about 57 cents per car, according to congressional hearings. As an internal G.M. memorandum put it, there was no “business case” for preventing crashes.

And that’s why we need regulation: Company executives can’t be trusted to police themselves. They sometimes blindly pursue a “business case” as it kills us.