Month: December 1999

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.

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.

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.