The Irony of Product Liability

Today a co-worker sent me one of those ha-ha-snicker e-mails that get passed around the 'net like the sniffles. It was a list of warning labels and disclaimers found on various products, the point being to show how stupidly obvious some of them are. Things like a package of peanut brittle saying "contains nuts".

Of course the real purpose of these warnings is for businesses to avoid any and all legal liability, but more often they're the result of stupid executives listening to stupid/dishonest lawyers scaring them with outlandish tales of how dangerous civil courts are. After all, nobody's really that stupid... are they?

Public opinion polls - on topics like stem cell research, economics, cloning, foreign policy, and anything else that requires some critical thinking skills and general thoughtfulness - tend to indicate that, yes: many people really are that stupid. Just look at the 2004 election results.

The irony is that it's mostly the Republican party that's trying to use these examples of liability-gone-amok to loosen regulations on corporations. That's ironic because, if these warning labels disappear, the first to die will be the epsilon semi-morons who - in addition to, say, buying "peanut brittle" despite severe peanut allergies - are most likely to vote Republican. The commerce-worshipping troglodytes in Congress are working to drain and fill in the neanderthal gene pool that they depend upon to stay in office.

Which is why I've decided to fully support the removal of product liability disclaimers on packaging. Yes, we'll lose some good-hearted mentally-challenged people along the way, but in the long run the collective intelligence of the species will go up enough that the Republican party will lose its electoral power base, and we can get a little smarts percolating up into Congress and the White House.