In the days of the robber barons, shoe-polish eaters were rare, for they died of eating shoe polish; in the welfare state, they sue the manufacturer for not imprinting the lid with Use only as directed. The benefits to the shoe-polish eaters and their brethren are minor
¾ though Consumer Alert (1024 J St./#425, Modesto, CA 95354, $20/yr) reports such cases as a strap manufacturer having to pay $1 million to a consumer who was injured while running a footrace with a refrigerator strapped to his back: the strap broke and thus, I take it, denied his inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.The real benefits to society, however, lie in the life breathed into a multi-billion economy of lawyers, "consumer" advocates, large sections of the professoriat and the consultantry, the government bureaucracy, and the other branches of the flow chart in which the shoe-polish eaters redistribute the wealth created by the shoe-polish producers.
One such branch is the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a government agency whose work has recently been evaluated by Prof. W.K. Viscusi of Duke University. (Regulating Consumer Product Safety, $5.95, AEI, 1150 17th St. NW, Wash., DC 20036). I have plotted some points from Prof.
Viscusi's data below; they remind me of nothing so much as of the effects, discovered by the renowned by the Dr. Sternglass, on the radioactivity of milk before and after Connecticut Yankee went on line, and of the drastic change in infant mortality in the neighborhood of TMI in 1979.
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Vol. 12, No. 1
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 12, No. 1 Date: November 29, 2004 12:25 PM Title: We have been here before
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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