We all hear the phrase, "if it saves one life..." repeated ad nasuem especially when discussing some type of proposed legislation. Unfortunately, those who make or support these types of statements do so because it feels good. To them there are no alternative or "opportunity costs." They think that the actions made to save one life costs little or nothing. At the very least, the actual cost is worth it. It never occurs to them to look at the actual costs and benefits to "saving one life." They are loath to think of life and death in such clinical terms. Yet consider this. Under the Environmental Protection Agency the Superfund program was designed to clean up hazardous waste. James T. Hamilton and W. Kip Viscusi studied 150 Superfund sites and found that "the expected number of cancers averted by remediation is less than 0.1 cases per site and that the cost per cancer case averted is over $100 million." If that $100 million was used in a more efficient manner imagine how many lives it could have saved, had it not been spent saving one?
A newspaper editorial columnist in response to the push for more anti-gun legislation wrote in the Denver Rocky Mountain News, "The proposed law, in my view, is proper and increasingly necessary one, if it deters but one kid." Apparently this columnist is not versed in the law of unintended consequences. We don't think it has occurred to him that in this attempt to "deter but one kid" these proposed regulations may actually endanger many others. It is an interesting mindset among many in the public and media that legislation always does what the legislature intended.
Both Al Gore and Bill Clinton have stated that, "We protect aspirin bottles in this country better than we protect guns from accidents by children." What they should have done was check with Harvard economics professor W. Kip Viscusi. He found that the child "safety" caps that manufacturers are required by law to place on aspirin bottles actually resulted in "3,500 additional poisonings annually of children under age 5." As it turns out, the "safety" caps encouraged parents to behave in a less than safe manner. Instead of placing these bottles where the children could not get to them, the parents assumed they were child proof and left them sitting out in the open. Children are able to get these lids off more than parents realize. In addition to that, parents often left the lids off entirely because they had trouble getting the lids off themselves which left the medicine completely exposed for children to get their hands on.
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