Lawyers are good people. Heck, my daughter is a lawyer. She went to Northwestern Law and is practicing now. A lot of my friends are lawyers. They practice all kinds of law from corporate to tax to litigation to defense.
There is one thing they have in common.
They see downsides. Law school trains you to look at things differently. This can be a great benefit and it can be a great hindrance. Many people who went to law school wind up in the government. They help write the words that phrase the laws and regulations that govern our land. Nothing wrong with that and we appreciate their service but they are killing civilization.
Inflation has supposedly pushed the cost of raising a child to $300,000. My family is excited about the impending birth of our first grandchild, so that headline caught my eye. I don’t think the headline number is correct; I haven’t gone through it with a fine tooth comb. I don’t care what the number is and didn’t care back when I had kids. You can’t put a dollar amount on them.
However, certain things are pushing people not to have kids. We aren’t in danger of overpopulation. We are in danger of running out of people! A lot of the greenies celebrate this. Some of them are even sterilizing themselves because of global warming or some other stupid reason. I did it myself after having two kids. I wouldn’t have but the second one had colic and if you have ever lived through that you might wish you had sterilized yourself nine months earlier.
When I was growing up, I knew a lot of big families. One of my buddies had 13. Now, people barely have two. We had three in my family.
Back to the lawyers.
Lawyers have written government regulations on things and that makes them a lot more expensive not to mention a pain in the ass. Car seats are one example. My kids had car seats. They didn’t die. I was in an accident once with my daughter in the back and she is fine, except she is the one that is the lawyer.
Have you seen car seats today? My daughter is getting close to giving birth and the doctor told her to put the car seat in the car. You can’t get them out. We used to take them in and out all the time and everyone was just hunky dory.
There are lots of YouTube videos just to show people how to install car seats. This is a real issue!
The study I linked to above says that car seats might be an economic force behind contraception. The abstract reads,
Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.
Amazing how forces and regulations you think were put in place for “good” actually inhibit the action that would cause you to use the regulation.
Imagine the discussion between parents that are in their child-rearing years. “Should we have the third one? No, Ajay isn’t 45 pounds yet at age 8 and we can’t fit three car seats in the back of our car.”
What regulators have done according to the study is to consistently raise the age of who needs to be in a specialized car seat without considering the actual cost of what that regulation meant. Meanwhile, studies have shown that car seats are negligible in preventing deaths after the age of 2.
Heck, I know parents that used to whip out the mobile cocktail set and make cocktails on the dash at 5PM while they were on summer cross-country drives with the family.
My mom used to smoke in the car with the little wing window open. Our 1965 Ford station wagon didn’t have air conditioning. It’s that little triangular window in the front.
My wife’s family traveled in a big Buick. Sometimes someone slept on the shelf that was between the back seat and window.
None of us died and none of us have cancer. None of us are lawyers either.
I see a lot of people tweeting about how great all these new regulations that just got passed will be. They say they will bring down inflation and make the cost of drugs cheaper.
I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that none of that happens. First, like the car seat regulations, all the stuff that just got passed ignores basic economics. Second, once the lawyers get involved in the actual implementation, guaranteed there will be second-order, and third-order, effects they never considered when they passed the bills. Stupidly, 18 Republicans voted for the Chip bill…..sheesh. Those guys need to retire. Most of them went to law school.
Lawyers need to learn microeconomics and opportunity costs at a bare minimum.
How many adults never touched a cigarette as a result of experiencing that smoky back seat hell as a kid? Me, for one.
As a general rule I happen to like lawyers, but have often thought that much of what is wrong with our country is based on so many of the people running it coming from that profession and/or educational background. I think it would be worth considering if there is a preponderance of a certain type of lawyer that goes into politics. I haven't thought this through.
Our family likes to have a good laugh about how "risky" and "reckless" our parents were in raising us. Most of it is hyperbole on our part to give our parents a good ribbing, but some of it is the realization that, yeah, maybe we were a little crazy.
The best example is seat belts. Car seats? No such thing. Seat belts? Not worn, or the old cars that we traveled in the 70's and early 80's did not have them. I can remember my mom driving a rust bucket that had poorly performing brakes and we could see the road under the rusted out driver's side floor. She often just downshifted the stick to slow down. Her method of "protecting" me was to reach over the bench seat and put her arm in front of my toddler body (standing on the seat) and hold me back. One hand on the steering wheel, the other holding me back. The cigarette in mouth, with her blonde hair flowing in the wind from the open windows (no AC!).
I often consider that we were probably more lucky than safe. But, people also built those risks into subconscious calculations about how fast or aggressive they could drive or behave. You knew the car wouldn't protect you, so you drove defensively. You were more alert. Is it safer to drive alertly and slowly with an old, heavy car or while texting and buckled up in a new Volvo?
And how about those kid's playgrounds? The hot, steel slide with the sharp edges. The asphalt ground covering. The "rocket" slide, WAY up in the air. The teeter totter, where you could easily smash your legs under it if you didn't clear it when your butt landed with a "BAMM" on the asphalt. The spinning equipment. I remember in preschool there was blood around that thing one day when one of the kids literally got spun off from the centrifugal forces of going too fast. We were shooed away from the pool of blood on the asphalt.
I realize that many of these things changed not because of lawyers, but because some kids died or got severely injured. The lawyers delivered accountability. I'm of the mindset that while it was nostalgic to think of our carefree lives, I'm aware that many people had gruesome injuries or death from basic dangers. Carmakers got away with murder -- literally. The lawyers were there to put fear into their decision-making, and I think that is a good antidote to excessive risk taking.
So, I hear you, Mr. Carter, but I for one am glad that things are now safer for my daughter than they were for me. I think there is nothing in the world that would devastate me more than her getting severely injured or worse. She is everything to me, as I'm sure your kids were to you.
I don't think I could survive something happening to her, even after all the things I survived in my childhood.