I was recently talking to a friend about the newly contentious topic of net neutrality. He was in favor of the regulations and I am against them. I listened to him explain all the typical arguments for it, citing the "need" for the government to make sure that ISP's don't throttle bandwidth and that "we" need to ensure accessibility to the internet and all that nonsense.
I don't really enjoy the entire process of meticulously explaining to people the nuances of why they're wrong, they never change their minds about issues that way, as they can always explain away seemingly insignificant minutia. A better approach is to present the general idea to them and see if it appeals to them. Instead of trying to prove him wrong about every detail of the topic, I just asked him a simple question. What are regulations?
His answer was what I would expect from most people who haven't critically analyzed what politics really is. This isn't a bad thing, politics is mostly irrelevant and people generally don't have much incentive to be very well informed or active in the area. My friend's take was very mainstream, that regulations are just the government giving people rules to make things fair, and if you don't follow the rules, there's a penalty. In other words, he wasn't making the connection that regulations inherently impose a cost on people.
This seemed to confuse him, he was under the impression that regulations only imposed costs to the bad people who didn't follow the rules, and whatever punishment they received was their fault.
The mistake made here is evident within the answer that he gave. Why do regulations have consequences? Why is it necessary to punish people for not following them? The answer is that otherwise people wouldn't abide by them because they're doing something that people don't want. Or in a much simpler way to say it, they're imposing a cost on them. That's all regulations are. Imposing an extra cost for some other desired effect.