Lawson Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute devotes his latest column at Human Events to 2015, “the year of the regulators.”

They’ve been chomping at the bit during these days of Holiday quiet and now they’re coming out swinging as they emerge from their Yuletide slumber. And, like Underdog, they are here to save the day.

Crises always help their case, of course. In the case of “the children,” it boils down to regulators’ perennial assumption that once a rule is in place, the resulting outcome will address the issue at hand. For example, in 2011 the government reported that two children under the age of 13 were killed every day because they were not wearing a seat belt. Yet, mandatory seatbelts are already law of the land. So much for cause and effect.

The Post reported that nine children died in 2014 under the care of unregulated Virginia day care centers. But children placed in regulated day care facilities also died, and while perhaps not at the same rate, the old causation/correlation problem emerges again, because accidents will still happen. In fact, several of the deaths at the unregulated facilities involved house fires that started from accidental factors that could occur in any regulated facility (and in our homes, for that matter).

Any parent understands that. When he was a toddler, my son once teetered at the top of a staircase and ambled all the way down before we could get to him. He did not suffer permanent injury. But others have not emerged so unscathed. Yet, Fairfax County, Virginia, where we live, does not require that we install gates at the top of every stairycase and landing. And even if they did, enforcement is not only impossible but unnecessary. A parent’s anguished guilt far exceeds any regulatory fine.

The Post also reported that Virginia Department of Social Services Commissioner Margaret Schultze emailed her staff saying that “the department and the administration are concerned over the growing number of child deaths in unregulated settings.” But what about deaths in regulated settings? Is the regulators’ job merely to check off the “Do something” box?