Every additional government regulation or tort carries with it a substantial cost. So I find it really depressing when something like the recent drowning of a small child in the wave pool at the Santa Clara Great America creates significant popular support for a law to fix the problem. Apparently the fact that the mother didn’t require her kid to wear a lifejacket in some people’s minds means that the government should step in and force people to wear them. This is despite the fact that “[o]n average, two or three people a year have drowned at water parks over the past decade,” a number I suspect is less than the number of people who have died driving to the parks.

While wearing life jackets may save lives this sort of law probably puts children at greater risk. Fear of liability will cause the lifeguards to spend their time yelling at people to put their lifejackets back on instead of searching for kids in trouble and parents may pay less attention than they did before. Now Great America has already decided to require lifejackets at all their installations but the mere existence of extra laws always has a cost. In addition to the obvious direct costs the more safety laws you pass the less mindshare each law can occupy in the park’s management. Additionally if you have too many safety laws people stop using their judgment and start relying on what the law says

What’s so frustrating about calls for these sort of laws is the obvious irrationality involved. It isn’t like our estimate of the number of lives this law would save suddenly increased nor did people even notice that that we usually pass safety laws when things are this dangerous. I mean it is totally absurd that we allow parents to needlessly expose their children to much greater risks by choosing not to vaccinate them or pointlessly taking them along in the car but it is wave pools that people think we need a law about. Unfortunately when people aren’t going to spend a great deal of time thinking about the matter the emotional pull of a tragic story is going to override any reasonable considerations.

This is just another reason that I really dislike direct involvement of the people in government. If we had a more indirect system of government where politicians didn’t have as much incentive to pander to constituents on individual emotional issues this sort of effect could be minimized. In particular the original electoral college system had a great many virtues but that’s a topic for another post.