The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Any authority can be measured by a single test: does it protect the lives under it, or spend them. Power tends to accumulate other purposes along the way, prestige, security, the survival of the institution itself, and those purposes can quietly outrank the people they were meant to serve. Keeping the measure simple is a way of refusing that drift.

You can apply the same test to anything you are part of, a workplace, a committee, a family arrangement. Ask what the arrangement is actually for, and whether the people inside it are better off for its existence. When the answer is no, the fix is rarely more rules, and usually a return to the original purpose.