To Regulate

"Police power" is the governing authority's ability to legislate for the protection of the citizens' lives, health, and property, and to preserve good order and public morals. The demand over the last twenty years has been for more regulation, but the tide is turning. The question has to be what is really needed and what just reactionary.
The police power allows the governing authority to establish rules of good conduct and good neighborhood which are calculated to prevent a conflict of rights and to insure to each the uninterrupted enjoyment of corresponding enjoyment by others.[1]
"Police power" becomes regulations. “The term “regulation” covers a great deal of territory. It can refer to prohibitions on discrimination on the basis of disability; to energy efficiency requirements; to automobile safety provisions; to safeguards against terrorist attacks; to restrictions on texting while driving; to efforts to reduce risks from chemicals; to bans on deceptive nutritional labeling; to required disclosure of relevant information about credit cards, school loans, and mortgages; to restrictions on air and water pollution; to incentives for
automatic enrollment in savings plans; and to much more.”[2]
While it should be clear that the reasons and consequences of regulation are highly varied. Regulations are designed to save lives, investments and rights. Some regulations save money. Some regulations cost a great deal. Some regulations preserve freedom of choice. Some regulations amount to flat prohibitions. Some regulations create jobs. Some regulations eliminate jobs.
The importance of the police power is given from the following language of the Wisconsin Supreme Court: "Without it the purpose of civil government could not be attained. It has more to do with the well-being of society than any other power. Properly exercised it is a crowning beneficence. Improperly exercised it would make of sovereign will a destructive despot, superseding and rendering innocuous some of the most cherished principles of constitutional freedom.
A basic limitation on the police power is "reasonableness." Property rights cannot be randomly destroyed by wanton legislative enactments. There is a limit to the powers which may be exercised by the governing authority. A reasonable relation must exist between the character of the legislation and the policy goal to be attained. That relationship has been expressed in various forms. One court said, "The police power is broad in its scope, but it is subject to the just limitation that it extends only to such measures as are reasonable in their application and which tend in some appreciable degree to promote, protect, or preserve the public health, morals, or safety, or the general welfare."
Another court said: "Police regulations, in order to be valid, must tend to accomplish a legitimate public purpose; that is, such regulations must have a substantial relation to the public objects which government may legally accomplish; and, while it is for the legislative department of a municipality to determine the occasion for the exercise of its police power, it is clearly within the jurisdiction of the courts to determine the reasonableness of that exercise.
This debate is one that continues through the ages and the process that determines how change should come about needs a full and open airing. The debate provides the justification for changing the way people think and live. Debate occurs daily in legislatures around the world, at the State, the faculty meetings at a school, and at your dinner table. The procedures for these debates may differ, but the process is the same. People engage in a discussion that will determine whether a particular change is good or bad.
Today’s American thinks it is the collective responsibility of the nation, through its governments, to ensure each citizen's equality, rights, safety, and freedom by ensuring fairness, transparency, and a healthy balance between private opportunity and the public interest. They believe that their government is neither a paradigm nor a panacea, but more fairly represented by this Churchill statement "the worst form of government, except for all the others." The government seeks to "improve" things in terms of making social arrangements more just, but has modest expectations for success.
[1] Thomas Cooley
[2] Cass R. Sunstein