LEGALITIES

A healthy society has no nail polish drinkers: They die off because they drink nail polish. There is something disturbingly wrong when the nail polish bottles say Use only as directed as a kind of amulet to protect the manufacturer from suits by nail polish drinkers and corporation baiters.

But what use are amulets? In the ever readable and thought-provoking campus weekly Ergo ($10.50/year, 3 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139) we read that Smirnoff vodka has been sued by some justice seeker who alleges that the makers "have caused personal injury to individuals by failing to make them aware of the amount of defendant's product that can be consumed safely..."

Overregulation does not just kill economic incentive; it kills individual responsibility.

It also kills energy production.

Another example is the suit brought by Prof. J. Sununu of Tufts University against the Clamshell Alliance for the $176,000 costs they inflicted on New Hampshire taxpayers by their organized brawls at Seabrook. To escape responsibility, the clams closed shop. Of course the kooks will be back. But the clams have clammed up and gone pft.

A third interesting case is that of Richard Saunders of Wichita, Kans., who shut down his 60-employee foundry when it became uneconomical to comply with the changes OSHA had ordered, choosing not to go to court to fight them (more in Wall Street J., 15 Sept., p.31).

His decision took OSHA by surprise. "I can show you case after case where we negotiated procedures to comply that were less strict," explained OSHA director for Kansas J. Spahn, who seems to believe in neither government of men nor government of laws, but in government by negotiable nuisance making.