To: Maurice Winn who wrote (25049 ) 11/5/2002 9:37:44 PM From: Stock Farmer Read Replies (1) | Respond to Mq, not so fast. Yes, you caught me out being a bit too flippant with my facts. But the point remains. There are benefits and there are costs and you are far more aggressive totting up the benefits without consideration of the costs. The value of all cellphone calls by drivers in moving vehicles must be huge. That is the value, PLUS the consumer surplus, which is the value of what is achieved by those calls. Offset that against the cost in lives and we'll be able to make a more sensible judgement. Since using a cellphone in a car doesn't spread costs onto other people or 'the commons' other than innocent victims who suffer death or injury [property damage falls on the cellphone user through insurance costs], we should trust people to make their own decisions. One minor fender-bender and the whole thing locks up tighter than a frogs rear end (which is water tight). To say nothing about a sprinkling of death and dismemberment. Trusting the broad mass of people to decide how things should run is what democracy is about. They don't always make good choices, but in the long run they perhaps do. A bit like Buffett's idea of markets being a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run. Democracy is a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run. Short term decisions are often nuts. In the long run things seem to muddle through better than the Kremlin way.
