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Countering the liability system of today's world

| March 4, 2021 1:00 AM

A wave of sadness hit me when I saw the hand-written sign: “No Sledding Today.” I was driving two miles from downtown Sandpoint, alongside what is known as the Pine Street Sledding Hill. In the winter, this broad, steep slope is populated with youngsters struggling to drag their sleds up and screaming with delight coming down. Now it was empty whiteness.

One could tell that this was private property. Though there was a large parking lot for the cars, there were no signs announcing anything about the facility, and there was a house and a trailer on the same land. 

The language of the sign seemed to suggest a temporary closure, but day after day, it stayed up. Then the newspaper story confirmed it: the sledding hill was closed.

Why?

“Liability issues,” said the owner Gary Weisz. “It brought tears to my eyes to close the Pine Street Hill.” Weisz’s family has let locals use the property as a sledding hill for decades.

“Liability.” A simple-sounding word, but it denotes a vast, out-of-control government program. The basic idea seemed simple. Instead of relying on people’s sense of personal responsibility to get them to show consideration for others, we would use government. We would employ the force of the state to punish the selfishly neglectful and to compensate the injured. However well-intended it may have been, the liability system has evolved into a costly bureaucratic burden to all human endeavors, from manufacturing to entertainment, from health care to sports. And the billions spent on lawsuits, liability awards, and liability insurance aren’t the only cost. Its threat of staggering loss blocks all kinds of creative, rewarding human activities. Like kids sledding down a snow-covered hill.

As a volunteer at the Sandpoint Teen Center, I’ve seen how, time and again, this threat blocks constructive ideas. Can I drive a few youngsters over to the Mickinnick Trail for a hike? Better not, our liability insurance doesn’t cover it. How many millions of times a day do Americans forgo a sensible, creative act because of that one word, “liability”? And how many forests have to be felled to print the mass of unreadable and unread liability warnings on everything from airplane tickets to cough drops?

There are many possible reforms to start bringing this behemoth under control: limit the time period after the event in which a suit may be filed; limit the size of awards; limit the payments to lawyers. But the politicians, beholden to special interests and endlessly fond of bureaucracy, aren’t interested in fixing this appallingly broken system.

So maybe it’s time for us, as citizens, to strike back directly. Here’s my idea. The next time the lawyers sue us, we sue them back! We file a liability lawsuit against them and their plaintiffs demanding a staggering financial compensation for the injury they are causing us, and people like us, in their negligent pursuit of wealth for themselves.

I leave it to the public service law firms to figure out the complexities of filing the necessary papers. The underlying logic of their mission is obvious. The liability industry poses a greater threat to human happiness than any tainted pills or defective appliances, and it’s time the perpetrators were brought to justice. We need to bring back a world where volunteers, doctors, managers, businessmen, inventors—and children—are free to pursue creative solutions and exciting challenges.  

JIM PAYNE

Sandpoint