The Hive Mind at Work: Safety

There are many still alive and taking solid food who remember those carefree distant times when children would dash out of the house with shoe laces half tied, hop on their bikes and pedal off to the playground or swimming hole or somebody's back yard. Once there they would play on whatever the playground offered, which were a variety of metal structures often covered in rust or sporting protruding sharp edges.  Or they would jump off rock ledges into the pond on top of their little playmates since there were no adults handy to tell them not to.  Or they would play at whatever occurred to them in or around the rusty old dead truck out in some field.  In the course of all this high risk behavior, of course no child would reach majority without a goodly number of scrapes and scratches, cuts and bruises.  
There are two very significant benefits to this.  One is that when you got one of these injuries, it hurt, and when you went home and your mother found out it would hurt again when she scrubbed it clean and applied iodine or merthiolate, either of which might as well have been napalm, and yet a third time when one parent or an other would give you that look and say “Well, that was stupid, what were you thinking?” All of this led you to avoid doing that again.
The second benefit is that having experienced actual pain at some time or other, you would develop a sympathy for others in the same boat. In addition, you would be less likely to inflict pain upon others either because you knew what it felt like and weren't mad enough to want to do this to your classmate, or because you figured they might find a way to get back at you in kind.
It is not clear what happened to this sensible approach to child rearing. Maybe the increase in communication.  Maybe some undermedicated Mom in Providence read a human interest story about a child in Montana who, while riding his bike somewhere east of Billings, skidded on something and impaled his head on a fence post, leading to his immediate and tragic death.  A story which found its way all the way east to Providence because it is the first time such a thing had ever happened.  Of the 6 million children who had ridden somewhere on a bicycle that day, one had suffered this bizarre trauma. Of the 200 million children who had ridden bicycles prior to that day, suffering no ill effect, this is the story that reached Providence. Suddenly an image of her own child's precious head run through with fence posts is all she can think of and she tries to make her little darling wear a helmet to which he responds by tossing it in the bushes as soon as he's out of sight of the house so his friends won't think he's a sissy. So the mom mounts a noisy assault on her state representative to mandate that all children must wear helmets. The cry is taken up by people in other states who are bad at math and before you know it everybody is wearing helmets, and a new industry is born.
This is closely followed by related industries producing elbow pads, knee pads, special protective gloves, shatter-proof goggles, Spandex clothing, specially designed shoes and innumerable sports drinks without which the child would perish horribly by the roadside on the two-mile ride to school. As usual it takes the government a while to sign on to this cash cow, but soon enough the fines appear for failing to adhere to whatever norms the Providence mom has managed to badger through congress.
The result of all this is that the suppliers of all this clap-trap have tasteful houses in Vail, Cancun, and the south of France, the Chinese factories making all this stuff are expanding like a dead possum in the hot sun, the local governments have a robust new revenue stream, and the children on bikes are so encumbered with armor that it is a wonder that they are able to ride a bike at all.  But they are safe, right? And that was the whole point, to which I would argue that one of the key ingredients of growing up is testing your limits.  If you find one avenue to this end blocked you will seek another, which may have more lasting and damaging effects than a skinned knee.
But that is just bicycles.  Anybody who has bought a ladder recently will have noticed that there is no flat surface on it that is not covered with bold-face warnings, cautions, exclamation marks, limitations of liability and so forth. Everything is covered including, but not limited to, the perils of electric wires, unstable footings, the use of the various latches and fittings, unsafe practices, angle of use. You might think it preferable just to let your gutters fill with leaves and then when they rip off the house under the weight of all that sodden detritus, just hire somebody to put up new ones.  Using their own death trap ladder.
On the other hand you can go to any hardware store and buy knives and hatchets and no end of implements that have breathtaking potential for mayhem and amputation, and you will find nothing on them apart from, perhaps, the manufacturer's name or “Stainless.”  It is all very confusing.  Should we protect our children from ladders and bicycles, but allow them easy access to knives and chisels?  If the Great White Regulator feels that We The People are so dim that we need to be told not to poke our fingers into a churning blender or reach under a lawnmower when the blades are spinning then surely we should not be allowed anywhere near gasoline or firearms.
So why all the fuss?  In this, the land of the free and the home of the brave, why shouldn't we just be allowed to cut off our fingers if we wish to, or cover 2/3 of ourselves with 3rd degree burns, or drown our infants in the bath?
Here are some explanations:
1.                Litigation – Any company afraid that their customers will sue them into bankruptcy in the event they incur some injury as a result of doing something incredibly stupid with their product will cover the product with warnings and cautions and devote the first 20 pages of the 24-page manual to Important Safety Information.”
2.                Revenue Stream – Governments are always on the lookout for new sources of income, and fees and fines are the gold standard, as they do not present the dangers of, say, a drug bust and its associated seizure of assets, nor do they incur the widespread antagonism of increased taxation.  If your neighbor gets a $300 fine for speeding while not wearing a seat belt, well, you are either not going to care at all or you will be thinking “Serves him right!”  The Government, in any case, comes out smelling sweet as a soft spring morning while gouging The Public just a surely as a tax hike would.
3.                Entrepreneurial Opportunity – A startling number of safety remedies involve special apparatus purpose-built for some specific hazard.  Somebody's going to make a killing off it, and it's a first-come-first-serve opportunity.  Of course, there is a certain amount of wiggle room.  Consider helmets: There are bicycle helmets, climbing helmets, football helmets, skiing helmets, hockey helmets, motorcycle helmets, skateboard helmets, and more, not to mention the military stuff. Each of these created one Really Rich Guy, at least 5 jobs here in the US and another 200 in China.
4.                A Deep and Real Concern for the Safety and Prosperity of The People – Not a chance.