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by jon l. shebel, publisher
The Swing Of The Pendulum
Franklin P. Adams once quipped, "There are plenty of good five-cent
cigars in this country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country really needs
is a good five-cent nickel."
A few days later, no doubt, some busybody politician proposed a law establishing a
five-cent nickel.
It's one of the blasphemies of modern political thought that every unhappy situation is
a problem seeking a political solution. Actually, society is too complex, enormous, and
organic for anyone to "solve" its "problems" with any finality. After
all, don't politicians spend as much time debating the nature of the problem (a lack of
good cheap cigars or good cheap nickels) as they devote to crafting a solution? And a good
part of the time they're wrong about the problem.
Six years into the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's money mandarins decided that
runaway inflation was an incipient problem -- in the midst of a depression, mind you. They
acted quickly to ward off inflation, clubbing to death a sputtering recovery and
prolonging the economic calamity. The result was obvious in hindsight, but the president's
money men did not enjoy the benefit of hindsight, merely a misguided confidence in their
ability to analyze and fix something they didn't understand.
Even with an accurate grasp of the conditions at hand, the best lawmakers can do is
tinker with the artificial systems we develop to control our relationships with each
other. They can't change human nature but they can reshape systems that get out of kilter.
The civil justice system is a perfect example of a system that's out of whack. Through
the concerted efforts of the legal brethren, the system lost any semblance of fairness and
of certainty of punishment for negligence. Issues of liability and damages became subject
to the rule of chance rather than the rule of law.
Often, lawmakers perceive their duties as correcting the swing of the pendulum. Is the
civil justice system favoring plaintiffs over defendants? In the debate over tort reform,
both sides had statistics and anecdotes to back up their perceptions. But sometimes the
"facts" are little more than snapshots of stops on the pendulum's journey. Just
as important to the debate are the ideas and principles that set the endpoints of the
pendulum's swing.
That aspect of legislating, namely, adherence to the principles that buttress our
society, is all too often ignored. If I had to sum up the plaintiff lawyers' philosophy of
the civil justice system (beyond the principle of self-enrichment) it would have to be in
the words of the man discredited by the 20th Century, Karl Marx: "From each according
to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Is the principle of redistributing
income through the courts one we want to adopt? That question is just as much a part of
the debate as any anecdote or statistical analysis.
At Associated Industries of Florida, we've spent almost 80 years making sure the
pendulum swings in a boundary set by the principles of economic liberty and political
freedom. Maybe the "problems" will never be "solved" but we'll make
sure they don't outlive the principles.
Jon L. Shebel is
president & CEO of Associated Industries of Florida and affiliated corporations.
July/August 1998 -- Florida Business Insight, 501 N. Adams St., Tallahassee,
Fla. 32302
(850)224-7173, insight@aif.com |
