Sudden Impact: The Collision of Ethics and Air Bag Mandates; E. Lomasky

But the air bag's benefactions do not come free of cost. Although deployment usually produces nothing worse than soon-healed bruises, a significant minority fares worse: over 120 people have been killed by air bag impact, almost always in low-speed accidents from which they otherwise would have walked away. Loren Lomasky teaches philosophy at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, and is the author of Persons, Rights, and the Moral Communi ty. This article is adapted from a paper published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 32 Any fatality is cause for regret of course, but realism compels us to acknowledge that few valuable interventions come altogether without cost. People die on operating tables during routine surgery, drown while enjoying an invigorating swim, get hit by lightning while out on a golf course. We can and should try to minimize the occurrence of such tragic outcomes, but as Milton Friedman famously observes, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Air bags save on the order of 30 lives for each one lost. It would seem on first blush that this lopsided ratio is an eloquent testimo nial to the regulatory regime that mandated them in all new vehicles. Few public safety measures, we might say, can claim so enviable a record of success.

Identifiable Victims Complicating the appraisal, however, is the fact that air bag fatalities do not occur at ran dom. Most victims of air bags are children (66 of the fatalities since 1990), typically infants or toddlers traveling in the front seat either unbuckled or strapped into child carriers. The air bag is most forceful as it leaves the dash board, and carriers, especially backwards facing ones for infants, bring their occupants closer to the point of explosion. Already vul nerable because of their small size, being in a forward location heightens. their risk. Other wise innocuous collisions produce crushed skulls, even a reported decapitation in an Idaho parking lot. Also at considerable risk The Foundation for Economic Education Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533 Tel. (914) 591-7230 Fax (914) 591-8910 E-mail: freeman@fee.org January 1999 The Grateful Pedestrian Y esterday evening I drove to a nearby restaurant. On my way I passed sev eral strolling pedestrians. I did not kill a singleone!

Please note that I possessed near absolute ability to do so. A quick and easy flick of my wrist on the steering wheel at almost any time on my drive would have meant certain death for numerous pedes trians. But I refrained from running them over. ****** The above account is true. Suppose now that you were one of these pedestrians and I solicit from you expres sions of gratitude for my not running you over. How would you react? Not only would you be indignant at my solicitation, you'd think me to be demented. And prop erly so. I would be insanely brazen to seek your gratitude for my not bulldozing you with my car. And yet politicians routinely seek-and receive-praise for actions that differ in no fundamental way from the actions of dri vers who avoid running down innocent pedestrians. We are bombarded by news reports and campaign ads boasting of how this presi dent or that governor "created" so-many million new jobs or is responsible for whatever amount of economic growth has occurred during his or her term of office.

Such claims are preposterous. They are on a moral and intellectual par with my claim that I deserve credit for not killing pedes trians with my car. No politician creates jobs or prosperity. Jobs and prosperity are created by entre preneurs and business firms whenever the economy is sufficiently free of government meddling. For government to avoid med dling-that is, for government to keep taxes low and to steer clear of regulating voluntary exchange-is indeed desirable. But to avoid interfering with voluntary exchange is not at all actually to create whatever jobs and prosperity emerge from voluntary exchange. To insist otherwise would be no different from my insisting that I, as a driver who did not run over Ms. Jones as she walked back from the super market, am responsible for the tasty dinner she cooked that evening for her family. If a car is careening out of control onto a pedestrian walkway, anyone who leaps into the car to stop it is a genuine hero.

This person does deserve applause and gratitude (while, incidentally, the persons who either intentionally or carelessly caused the car to be out of control deserve condemnation and, perhaps, jail time). But even this hero does not take credit for all that is created and produced by those who would have otherwise been killed.

Whenever that rarest of creatures-an honorable elected official-actually man ages to loosen some part of government's grip on us, that person merits bona fide acclaim. Even he, however, doesn't deserve credit for whatever economic growth and cultural flourishing follow. Such credit properly belongs to the count less people who create, innovate, take risks, save, and work hard to produce what consumers want. The idea that government deserves credit for all of the benefits produced by freedom is a special case of the pernicious deification of government. When deified, government is mistakenly seen as respon sible for all that happens in society. A distressingly large number of writers contend that what looks like government's refusal to intervene is really just a different form of government intervention. I offer here only two examples. One is left-wing economist Warren Samuels who, in a 1995 issue of CriticalReview,wrote that deregu lation is simply government regulation carried out by enforcing private property rights rather than by enforcing bureaucrat ic edicts. When the economy is deregulat ed, what Samuels sees is that "[o]ne sys tem or structure of (nominally private) coercive power is substituted for another by the very institution, government, which helped establish and/ or reinforce the first one." According to Samuels, only the unsophisticated believe that when govern ment deregulates it thereby reduces its sway over the economy.

This view isn't confined to left-wingers. Louis Hacker, in an otherwise fine essay appearing in F. A. Hayek's edited volume Capitalismand the Historians,insists that "the idea of laissez faire is a fiction. For the state, by negative action-that is, by refus ing to adopt certain policies-can affect economic events just as significantly as when intervention occurs." Well, yes-in the same way that I, by not running my car over pedestrians, can affect events just as significantly as if I do kill pedestrians. Only in the most base materialist sense are Samuels and Hacker correct: insofar as government possesses power to restrict commerce and suffocate industry with its regulations, any self-restraint by govern ment in its zeal to regulate can be said to II affect economic events." But such sophistry sneakily erects as the benchmark for evaluating government activity the maximum possible destruction that gov ernment could possibly inflict. If the actual amount of destruction caused by govern ment falls short of what government could.

have caused, then government is credited with producing all that it refrained from destroying. Using such a benchmark is lunacy. The Soviet military couldhave annihilat ed the United States population with an atomic attack at almost any time during the cold war. Should we then credit the Soviet military for our current prosperity and our very lives? Does it really make sense to speak of the Soviet military as having II affected economic events" by not launching a nuclear strike against America? If so, then why not also credit the decision by the British military not to launch a nuclear attack against us as a cause of our prosperity? Refraining from interfering in other peo pIe's affairs is simply the right thing for everyone, including government, to do. Our praise is properly reserved for people who heroically help others whom they have no duty to help, while our condem nation is properly reserved for people who intrude uninvited into others' lives. (By the way, to heroically help another person is to do so voluntarily and with your own resources and effort. You're no hero if you are coerced into giving aid to another; you're a slave. Likewise, you're no hero if you coercively confiscate the resources or efforts of third parties to help others; you're a thug.) Until someone convinces me that I deserve a ticker-tape parade every time that I don't run down a pedestrian with my car, I will find intolerable the misbe gotten gratitude and applause that politi cians receive for not destroying even more of our liberties and wealth than they cur rently ravage.

Donald J. Boudreaux President January Book Sale H enry Hazlitt was uniquely gifted and uniquely generous. His intellectual gifts are clearly evident in his many newspaper columns and magazine articles and in his books. Much like Frederic Bastiat, the great 19th-century French journalist, Hazlitt had a special talent for explaining economic principles in an easy-to understand and informative style. But Hazlitt should be remembered for his generosity also. A member of FEE's Board of Trustees from 1946 until his death in 1993, Hazlitt bequeathed both his personal library and a portion of his estate to the Foundation. He was a very special friend of FEE, and a very special friend of freedom. This month, we recommend Hazlitt's fine works for your consideration. The Conquest of Poverty - "The history of poverty is almost the history of mankind." The key word in the sentence is "almost." Thanks to capitalism, poverty isn't the whole story of humankind. What this book does is to demonstrate the incredible capacity of free markets and free people to overcome the affiliction of want. Hazlitt unearths historical examples of poverty programs, debunks myths of the welfare state, and talks about why socialism just won't work.

He ends with a refreshingly direct suggestion for curing poverty: "[b]asically each individual or at least each family - must solve its own problem of poverty." Individuals acting responsibly within a market economy - this is the secret to ending human want. Paper, 240 pages $16.95 Sale: $7.00 The Failure of the "New Economics" - Think Keynesianism is dead? Think again - Asian nations outlaw" dangerous speculation" while American steel manufacturers take out full-page ads calling for mercantilist policies. Sadly, the ghost of Keynes lives. Keynes's magnum opus, GeneralTheoryofEmployment,Interestand Money,is thoroughly analyzed and, well, destroyed in this insightful and prescient book. Hazlitt exposes the many confusions in Keynes's work and dissects Keynesian theories of consumption, interest, and capital. Arguing throughout that no important doctrines in GeneralTheoryare both true and original, Hazlitt does a masterful job of knocking Keynes off his pedestal. Excellent ammunition to counter the intellectually challenged proponents of the welfare state.

Paper, 458 pages $ 16.95 Sale: $7.00 The Critics of Keynesian Economics - Another of Hazlitt's provocative excursions into macroeconomic theory. This edited volume collects twenty-two essays that take the ideas of Keynesian economics to task. Among the writers represented in this work: Frank Knight, F.A. Hayek, L. Albert Hahn, Ludwig von Mises, and W.H. Hutt. Hazlitt also provides readers with Say's Law (which Keynes refuted) and John Stuart Mill on consumption. This anthology is a most helpful research tool and resource for advocates of limited government and free markets. Cloth, 427 pages $24.95 Sale: $7.00 The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt - This unique collection includes tributes to Hazlitt from Mises as well as FEE Trustees Bettina Bien Greaves and Edmund Opitz. The book captures Hazlitt's insights about the marvels of free markets, the problems of poverty and how these problems are exacerbated by welfare-state policies, and the need to remain vigilant in the defense of individual liberty and voluntary exchange. This engaging grouping of Hazlitt articles provides an excellent introduction to Hazlitt's philosophy.

Paper, 356 pages $16.95 Sale: $7.00 Postageand Handling: Please add $3.00 per order of $25.00 or less; $4.00 per order of $25.00 to $50.00;$5.00 per order of more than $50.00. Send your order, with a check or money order to FEE, 30 South Broadway, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533. Credit card orders - $10.00 minimum please: Visa, MC, Discover, American Express, or fax orders are welcomed. Please call 800-452-3518,or fax us at 914-591-8910.

A Special Message from the President Help FEE Meet the Challenge. A rare opportunity for your support to multiply! • • In November it was my privilege to announce that FEE had received a major new challenge grant from two anonymous contributors. If FEE raises $150,000 in new money (gifts received and deposited by March 31, 1999), these supporters will give FEE an additional $100,000. Put another way, if we meet this challenge every three dollars you help us to raise will yield an additional two dollars! "New money" is any money from people who have never before given to FEE, as well as contribu tions by existing donors above the level of their last contribution. With your help, we can meet this challenge and do more than ever to bring liberty to life in 1999. Donald J. Boudreaux President Contributions can be made by telephoning (800) 452-3518 and using your Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover Card, or by using the reply envelope included in this issue. For those who have recently contributed, a heartfelt thanks from the entire FEE staff and Board of Trustees.

are the very old, the very frail, and short dri vers who seat themselves close to the steering column. For them the air bag is not a friendly bodyguard but potentially a weapon that maims and kills. By requiring manufacturers to install air bags in all new cars, the federal government is, then, not simply mandating a policy that confers substantial benefits on the population at large, albeit tempered by occasional harms. Rather, governmental policy deliberately and knowingly enhances the safety of one identi fiable group of citizens at the expense of another. It literally has redistributed expected life years between these two classes. Last fall, the government sought to address this problem in its characteristic way. Instead of permitting freedom of choice so people can select safety features tailored to their own circumstances, it proposed fine-tuning the rules to take into account that small and unbelted bodies may be in the seats. The auto industry fears the newly mandated air bags will be as dangerous as the first generation of bags that threatened children and small, frail adults. Even if this attempt at central planning of technology works, it won't take effect until 2006. (Earlier, the government tried to address the danger by allowing qualifying cit izens to have a disabling switch installed.) Some observers find troubling all govern mental edicts designed to protect people against themselves, to force them "for their own good" to act in ways they less prefer or that attempt to engineer compliance by subsi dizing officially approved behavior and laying taxes and other penalties on that which is dis approved. For one who takes the free society seriously, this sort of governmental paternal ism is odious. I confess I am troubled by these incursions on individual choice. If people wish to drive around in their cars unbelted or dispense with helmets while motorcycling, choose to smoke cigarettes or consume slabs of marbled beef followed by gooey chocolate desserts, I may regard their decisions as imprudent. But if those engaging in these behaviors are competent adults I do not see that I-or anyone-enjoys the prerogative of constraining them to do otherwise.

One need not be a dyed-in-the-wool oppo33 nent of paternal government to be disturbed by regulations that protect us from ourselves. That's because they contravene broadly shared moral principles that address the acceptability of forced tradeoffs across per sons and that govern the relationship between a liberal government and its citizens. Ends in Themselves There is no more fundamental principle of ethics than the proposition that human beings are special. Each person manifests a unique ness that confers a dignity that no mere thing possesses. They are not interchangeable com ponents of a social whole who may be plugged in and plugged out like chips in a computer. In the Western tradition of moral reflection, this understanding has been expressed in many forms. One is the theory of basic human rights that establish zones of limited sover~.gnty within which individuals may act with ut interference so long as they respect the si ilar liberty of others. Another is the traditional natural-law doctrine which insists that no otherwise good state of affairs can be pursued if doing so requires acting with injustice toward another human being.

Yet another version is the Hippocratic Oath's insistence, "First, do no harm." But this moral insight was perhaps best expressed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant when he insisted that human beings, whether oneself or another, are not to be used as mere means for someone's projects but rather must always be treated as ends in themselves. Although it is not altogether certain what this dictum comes to, there are clear cases of its applica tion to which there is general assent. They spotlight what is morally distinctive about persons. Let me offer a few simple examples. Although it is entirely reasonable to take apart one auto to salvage parts that will restore five other vehicles to operability, it is strictly impermissible to mine one healthy person's body for organs that could be trans planted to save five other individuals. Similar ly, it is unacceptable to frame an innocent per son in a kangaroo court so as to mollify the mob milling ominously about. Fraud and deceit evince a willingness to manipulate the 34 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • JANUARY 1999 beliefs and desires of others so as to render them instruments for one's own designs; assault and rape run roughshod over the essential embodiedness of persons; theft is the action of treating someone as a resource one may freely plunder for one's own ends; mur der is literally the obliteration of personhood.

Using others as mere means achieves its most fully developed institutional form in the prac tice of slavery. It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that insofar as current air bag policy knowingly advances the life prospects of one group of cit izens at the expense of another, it violates this most fundamental of moral precepts. It also puts in jeopardy the bedrock principle ofliber al democratic government, political neutrality. Briefly,this is the requirement that the state not take sides concerning the projects and pursuits of its citizens. Individuals acting in their pri vate capacity are free, of course, to be passion ately partisan with regard to their religious creeds, ideological convictions, aesthetic tastes, and conceptions of the good life; the state, though, is not permitted to anoint win ners and losers in these disputations. Rather, its role is to be the fair and impartial enforcer of the rules under which individuals operate, an umpire rather than a player in the game.

If air bags were options that car buyers could select if they desired, but forgo if their individual circumstances so dictated, then no class of individuals would be forced to be the unwitting instruments of others' ends; the government would not be acting with partial ity toward some at the expense of others. Note that even those who qualify for the disabling switch are nevertheless financially penalized by the mandate. Do we really believe it acceptable for the government to penalize those who wish to safeguard the health and lives of their loved ones? Protection for the Imprudent As noted at the outset, air bags burst out at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour. If they were less forceful they would still adequately protect motorists who are belted in, but those who neglect to use seat belts will sometimes suffer injuries that high-speed air bag deployment could have obviated. There is, then, a tradeoff implicit in the regulation as it stands: it affords greater protection to the lazy and imprudent at the expense' of babies and oth ers. Make no mistake about it; there is noth ing in the technology that renders this tradeoff unavoidable, and the government says it's now interested in air bags with adjustable deploy ment speeds. But today's dangerous air bag was deliberately engineered through govern mental mandates.

If all air bags could be disabled via a stan dard switch, then foolish or unwise drivers might forgo protection that they would be bet ter off having. To protect them against them selves, parents are impeded in their efforts to better protect their children. Can anyone rea sonably deny that these examples of regulato ry partiality are morally bizarre? One response that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has offered in the wake of revelations about air bag injuries and fatalities is that children under 13 should not, whether in car seats or otherwise, be placed in the front seat. The intended impli cation is that children are not so much the victims of air bags as they are of parental malfeasance. The point is, to an extent, well taken. To assign credit or blame to regulators does not absolve parents of responsibility. However, this response hardly gets the regulators off the moral hook. First, it does not address the issue of other vulnerable populations such as short drivers and the elderly. Second, it sometimes is impossible or impracticable to place all child passengers in the back seat. And third, it is in tension with a regulatory structure that is predicated on the assumption that individuals are not competent enough to be left to make their own choices. At the very least, then, it is a piece of bad faith to downplay the enormity of the human costs air bags impose by protest ing that they would be lower if people were generally more provident.

Unrealistic Demand? What will the regulators say in defense of their position? They might argue that to impose on social policy the condition that it SUDDEN IMPACT: THE COLLISION OF ETHICS AND AIR BAG MANDATES 35 produce only winners and no losers is unreal istically idealistic, indeed unworldly.Virtually nothing could traverse so high a barrier. For example, polio vaccination has mostly elimi nated in this country what was once a deadly scourge. Yet each year some individuals come down with polio, in almost every instance from the vaccine itself. Should we allow the return of polio epidemics rather than accede to these very occasional instances of harm due to inoculation? That objection misfires because the analogy on which it rests breaks down. To be sure, some individuals who are vaccinated would have been better off had they not received the vaccine. However, we cannot tell in advance which ones they are. For each person getting the vaccine, the ex ante probability of a polio free life is augmented. Probabilities are not certainties, so ex post some will find that they have pulled the short straw and are worse off.

That's too bad for those who lose, but it does not falsify the proposition that for all players it was a good bet to take. Such is not the case, however,with air bags. Babies and small adults are placed in jeop ardy so that those older and larger can be afforded greater protection. The regulators know this now, and the record indicates that they knew it back in the late '70s when air bag regulations were initially being promulgated. So a closer analogy would be to a world in which vaccine is produced by knowingly and deliberately inflicting some with full-blown polio so that their tissues can be harvested and used to confer immunity on others. Would we regard that as acceptable social policy? Regulation's Opportunity Costs There are numerous other grounds for questioning the federal government's air bag mandates. Insistence on universal employ ment of this one safety device precludes experimentation that might generate better alternative safety measures. If cars are made more expensive by the requirement that they carry air bags, then car owners will have less money available to spend on other safety enhancing measures. (The new generation of bags might add as much as $160 to the car's price.) For example, they may not be able to afford to get their vehicles serviced as often as they otherwise could. Perhaps they will be forced to drive around longer in older, rela tively unsafe automobiles rather than pur chase newer, relatively safe ones. Or with the money freed up by not purchasing an air bag, consumers could purchase larger vehicles that better withstand crashes. (At least they could if the government did not discourage manu facture of big cars that burn more gas than lit tle cars. This is yet another irony transfixed like a hapless fly in the regulatory web.) It is also the case that individuals differ in the strength of their needs and desires for enhanced safety. Someone who drives defen sively and who routinely uses his seat and shoulder belts may quite reasonably judge that the increment of safety afforded at the margin by an air bag does not justify its cost.

These grounds for opposing mandatory air bags commonly pop up in. the policy debate. Each is essentially based on an eco nomic way of thinking that bids us to be aware not only of the benefits that we pro cure through our expenditures but also their associated costs. In calling these reasons economic I do not mean thereby to dispar age them. To the contrary: such efficiency considerations are central to rational policy making. However, they often spawn a response to the effect that issues of public safety transcend dollars-and-cents calcula tions. Life is too precious, it will be said, to be stuffed into Procrustean cost-benefit computations; morality ought to trump mere monetary considerations. I could not agree more. This discussion has insisted that morality does indeed matter. It has, however, seriously called into question whether federal bureaucrats and so-called consumer advocates genuinely do occupy the moral high ground. The fact that air bags on balance save lives does not necessarily secure for them this position. There are other criteria that must be met, criteria such as treating indi viduals as ends in themselves and not bending the technology of governance to the service of some classes of citizens at the expense of oth ers. It is simply unacceptable to save lives by knowingly forfeiting others. D Peripatetics The Art of Plunder W hen the Washington Post recently hon ored Sidney Yates, 89, on the occasion of his retirement, the headline emphasized that he "Made His Mark on the Arts."