February 15, 2007
Asbestos, Tobacco, Guns, and Blame Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:20 PM EST One of the myths of our time, fostered by self-serving tort lawyers (if you’ll pardon the redundancy), politicians, and bureaucrats, is that corporations are soulless moneymaking machines always quite ready to knowingly sell dangerous, even deadly, products at a profit. Meanwhile it is governments and tort lawyers who fearlessly patrol the market place to protect the consumer and bring malefactors of great wealth (there is, of course, no profit for tort lawyers in suing impecunious malefactors) to justice. The media, often supplied with ready-made if tendentious sob-stories by—guess who!—tort lawyers, are all too often ready and willing to buy into the myth. But all too often government has been one of the prime movers in selling products that are known to be or are later found to be unsafe. And governments can’t be sued, thanks to the ancient legal doctrine of sovereign immunity. In World War II, for instance, the Navy mandated the use of asbestos in the massive shipbuilding program of the time. Had the shipyards or the asbestos manufacturers refused to use it, they would have been seized by the government in a New York minute. It was the military’s distribution to servicemen of free cigarettes in both world wars that caused the rapid increase in smoking among males in the first half of the twentieth century. Shortly after New Orleans became the first city in the country to sue gun manufacturers for failing to install safety devices on their products, it sold 7,300 guns seized by the police to gun dealers, assuring their quick return to the streets. All this is detailed in a great article in Reason magazine by my friend Walter Olson, which can be found here. His point is not that government should be as sueable as other entities. (Wouldn’t tort lawyers just love to sue the deepest pockets on the planet, even if that meant that every government action and decision got second-guessed by a jury?) Instead, he argues merely to dispense with the myth. As he puts it, “Maybe it’s time to discard the caricature still so much favored in some circles, in which profit-making entities wear the black hats and public servants the white. We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that governments necessarily do worse than businesses in preventing risk to the public. But there isn’t much evidence that they do better.”
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