Month: December 1999

Monday, December 20, 1999

My kingdom for an unsafe airline …

Requiring
safety seats masks deeper dangers from USA Today

        This link probably
won’t be active for long, but USA Today gets it right for a change editorializing
against ridiculous “safety” regulations the government wants
to impose on airlines. In this case the Federal Aviation Administration
claims that requiring infants and small children to be strapped into child
safety seats would from 1978 to 1994.

       In fact, as USA
Today notes, requiring infants to be strapped into child safety seats
would have resulted in far more children being killed. Why? Because currently
airlines offer deep discounts for small children who sit on their parents
laps while flying. Strapping those children into safety seats requires
occupying an entire seat. Since somebody must pay for all those additional
seats and associated costs, the likely airline response is a slight rise
in the cost of air travel for infants. Although many people will be price
insensitive to such small increases, it will influence a significant portion
of travelers to choose much more dangerous methods of transportation —
such as driving — over flying.

      USA Today cites a 1995
FAA report, for example, that estimated discounting an infant’s seat 75%
would still result in 20 additional adult and child fatalities over a
10 year period — four times as many deaths as the FAA claims it would
save over a 16 year period. USA Today rightly excoriates the FAA, writing:

       The obvious solution
is to give people a choice. An obvious start would be for the FAA to allow
each of the major airlines to create an alternative air company exempt
from FAA safety regulations with a few small provisos — measured on a
per mile traveled basis, the death and injury rates from these regulation-free
airlines can never exceed half of that for automobiles. These airlines
will be dangerous to travel compared to other airlines, but they will
still be twice as safe as traveling by car. The other stipulation is that
the airlines must make clear that they are exempt from FAA regulations
up front and must print on every ticket a side by side comparison of per-mile
injuries and deaths for both automobiles and the regulated airlines.

       The only way such
an airline is going to remain competitive is by price competition — undercutting
its highly regulated but pricier big brothers. The result should be an
overall decline in deaths across the board both from declines in automobile
deaths as well as an additional increase from the associated savings of
both fewer deaths and injuries as well as lowered transportation costs.

 

Last February
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms gave permission to several
vintners to include labels on their wine discussing the possible health
benefits of alcohol consumption. Several studies have found moderate wine
consumption associated with a reduction in heart attack risk.

Enter Republican
Senator Strom Thurmond (South Carolina) whose daughter was killed by a
drunk driver. Thurmond tightened the screws on the ATF and the agency
reversed itself and has stopped approving new applications for wine labels
that make the health claim. Seventeen wineries that already obtained approval
will be allowed to go ahead with their labels.

Thurmond held
up Treasury Department nominees in order to force the ATF to create formal
rules for such labels. The ATF will hold public hearings on the issue,
though dates and locations have not been set, and it is likely that in
order to appease Thurmond the ATF might eventually approve rules so difficult
to comply with that the health claim labels might be short-lived.

I’m extremely
skeptical of the health claims made for alcohol, but individuals should
be able to make up their own minds rather than having Thurmond decide
how much information they have about possible health benefits associated
with wine consumption.

Reference:

ATF
puts cork on bid to tout health benefits on wine labels from Scripps
McClatchy.

The government vs. the homeless

By Brian
Carnell

       Overlawyered.Com
has a brief piece today on the menace of homebaked pies. It seems members
of an Adventist Church in Connecticut wanted to bake pies and donate them
to homeless shelters, but Connecticut sate health officials put an end
to those shenanigans quickly. A state law requires that the only pies
a shelter can distribute are those produced commercially or that are made
in the shelter’s kitchen. Donated pies get thrown out. Thank goodness
Connecticut officials put a stop to these efforts to help the homeless
before somebody got hurt. (Discuss
this article)

The courts vs. car buyers

Create
wise policy, not crash-proof cars by Mitch Silver (Christian Science
Monitor)

       Sticking with
the legal theme for a moment, Mitch Silver has written an excellent piece
on the idiocies of regulation by lawsuit. As Silver demonstrates, excessive
litigation threatens to undermine the very safety of the cars Americans
drive.

       Silver cites a
recent case where a jury returned a $4 billion judgment against General
Motors, which a judge later reduced to just over $1 billion. The problem?
In order to protect the occupants of cars in crashes, auto makers design
the front and rear of the car to crumple in a collision and thus absorb
much of the force that might otherwise kill occupants. In the case that
GM lost, a drunk driver hit a stationer car from behind at 70 miles per
hour — enough force to smash the gas tank and burn four children sitting
in the back seat of the car.

       The jury essentially
found that GM’s car design was flawed precisely because it performed as
designed. There is no way to create a car that most people can afford
that will protect from injury or death in every automobile accident. As
Silver points out, the only way to get this sort of protection is to build
every automobile to resemble the two-passenger, $65,000 Hummer.

       Unfortunately,
that solution has prohibitive tradeoffs as well. The United States, unfortunately,
is quickly becoming a nation where courts and government successfully
argue that it is wrong for consumers to every assume any risk. But the
fact is we are always assuming risks and measuring the tradeoffs of risks
in our most basic daily decisions. The courts are quietly creating a standard
of risk that few of us would choose for ourselves but that will soon be
a de facto mandate due to manufacturers’ fears of billion dollar lawsuits.

(Discuss
this article)

Nobody really wants independent radio stations

Low-power
radio advocates seek a spot on the airwaves from Scripps McClatchy

       The FCC appears
to finally favor approving some sort of low-power radio standard but is
dragging its feet as the large station owners continue to fight the proposal
tooth and nail. National Association of Broadcasters hack Jeffrey Bobeck
displays the typical … of those enjoying a government granted monopoly
when he complains that people really don’t want small, independent radio
stations because the big boys give us all we need:

Our members provide quite a bit of free air time for public
service announcements. Many stations have community bulletin boards.
If there really is a crying need for it in a community, it usually gets
on the radio … We feel it’s a small group of people who believe they
have a right to own a radio station.

Sounds like the whining of people who think they have a
right to exclude people from owning a radio station.

       Not that anyone
can really blame Bobeck and his fellow monopolists. The explosion of the
world wide web over the past four or five years demonstrates that when
barriers to entry are lowered, individuals and groups will produce exciting,
innovative content that runs rings around the boring, spoon-fed nonsense
the mainstream media serves up. Bobeck claims the NAB isn’t worried about
low-power radio stations taking revenue away from the monopolists. He
should be. (Discuss
this article)