Sometimes, businesses actually do need to be reminded of how to operate without endangering the public. I recognize that there are absolutist free-market adherents who oppose all forms of government regulation, control, interference, what-have-you. But we had that utopia back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It resembled current China in some ways with mercury and other fun poisons added to medicines and foods, and a general devil-may-care attitude. Theres a reason the FDA arose - even if incurious people choose not to look at actual history. Acknowledged that on the flip side of absolutism, not all regulation is good or perfect. But the fact is that people I know who champion the completely unfettered free market and claim it knows best how to self-regulate - also happen to be people who champion things like tort reform. And lawsuits have traditionally been one of the only ways to dissuade or at least rein in damaging behavior. Absent any kind of dissuasion or penalty, there is little incentive for businesses to operate in anything close to a logically safe manner. West Virginia was a nice place for businesses to run without a lot of nasty government oversight. So they planted chemical tanks upstream of the essential water supply of 300,000 people. Makes business sense - I guess. And now the governor is belatedly doing the old pound of cure fix. Because we all know that it makes a lot more financial sense to fix things expensively after the fact than to spend just a little to make them less likely to happen in the first place. huffingtonpost/2014/01/25/freedom-industries-storage-tanks_n_4666402.html
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 15:45:11 +0000
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