Letters

From the June 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Together, these groups make up roughly one-quarter of the U.S. population. It is not enough to say that people should be free to opt for more risk. Under current government rules, many car owners are forced to pay extra for no benefit whatever. That's a point almost everyone, including Doherty and Michael Fumento, has missed.

Finally, a note about media coverage. In this instance, it was media pressure that forced a government agency to respond to real risks that it had been covering up for decades. Kudos to the reporters who explained these risks to readers in the face of unrelenting airbag hyperbole from government officials and so-called safety advocates.

John Merline
Washington Bureau Chief
Investor's Business Daily
Washington, DC

When it comes to airbags, Brian Doherty's freedom-of-choice philosophy is right, but his facts are wrong. He characterizes the risks posed by airbags to children as minuscule, in contrast to the large number of lives saved by airbags. According to Reason Science Correspondent Michael Fumento, Doherty tells us, this is yet another overblown epidemic "hyped by an alarmist media."

But while Fumento has been brilliantly incisive on many issues, the airbag isn't one of them. In his op-eds he has dismissed the issue as paling beside such public health problems as childhood obesity and folic acid deficiency. Fumento views the Department of Transportation's proposal to allow deactivation of airbags as a reaction to "hysteria." The airbag's risks, however, are not so easily dismissed. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, for front-seat occupants aged 10 and under, the airbag raises the risk of death by up to 120 percent. By comparison, lap-shoulder belts reduce fatality risk by 40�50 percent. If the airbag's threat to kids is really too small to warrant attention, so are the benefits from wearing belts. By Doherty and Fumento's logic, it's a waste of time to buckle up, let alone make our children buckle up.

More important, current airbag risks are the result not of nature or technology but of politics. Airbags are designed to satisfy not consumer demand but an across-the-board federal rule. If there were no government mandate, airbags would be a matter of choice, not fiat, and airbag designs would not all be focused on protecting the 167-pound, unbelted male enshrined in the current federal standard. By Fumento's public health standards, no government fiasco in this country would count for much--not FDA delays in drug approval, not IRS abuses, not Waco. But the standards applicable to natural or chosen risks are different from the standards we apply to political outrage. Nature can do pretty much whatever it wants, but we're still entitled to a government of limited power. It's for this reason that media hype and public anger over airbags are to be applauded, not derided.

Sam Kazman
General Counsel
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington, DC

Brian Doherty replies: I appreciate Mr. Merline's laying out in some detail the differential risks that the government ignores by imposing a single safety standard on everyone. The point that children under 13 are advised by these same safety mavens to never be in the front seat of a car with airbags, which I mentioned in my editorial, changes the risks to children considerably, though. That's where the question of "libertarian purity" comes back in: The state ought not dictate safety features that force kids out of the front seats if parents want them there. The dangers of government's tendency in risk regulation to ignore relative risks--to, as I wrote, "mak[e] one, society-wide cost-benefit analysis for everyone"--is what my editorial was about, although length limitations prevented spelling out specifics in the detail Merline did here.

In my editorial, I felt it necessary to acknowledge the point about airbags' risks made by REASON colleague Michael Fumento in a newspaper column. This does not mean, as Mr. Kazman writes, that I think the "threat to kids is really too small to warrant attention." In fact, it warranted the attention paid to it in the act of writing the editorial. NHTSA spokesman Timothy Hurd told me that that the increased risk to kids from airbags is only around 20 percent; that is, in two groups of 100 cars, one with airbags and one with seat belts only, if five kids would have died in crashes without airbags, six might have died with them. Lap-shoulder belts, meanwhile, would help anyone live through 40 to 50 percent of crashes that would otherwise be fatal.

Fumento was referring to total deaths caused by airbags, not relative probabilities of death for children who happen to be in the front seat of a car when an airbag activates. He was making a public service point to assuage panicky parents, not a public policy point. Of course, as Kazman says, the fact that the risk to children, however small, is caused by regulations does change the complexion of the argument.

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