BSI British Standards, an official setter of benchmarks, is drafting guidelines on safety inspections for trees that cast a very different light on these venerable denizens and the hidden dangers of “branch shedding” (falling branches, to the layman) and even “whole-tree failure” that they pose. It suggests they should all be scrutinised once a year by their owners. Trained inspectors should beat them with mallets and prod them with probes every two years or so and still more expert folk assess the risk they pose to ambling, snoozing or tree-hugging passers-by every five years. With such a draconian standard proposed, one could be forgiven for thinking that trees pose a grave threat to life and limb, one surely magnified by the fact that these seemingly ferocious specimens cover some 12% of Britain. Yet, according to the best available data, kamikaze trees crush only some six people to death a year (though more die after driving into fallen trees or branches). In contrast, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents reckons that more than 4,000 are killed each year in accidents in their own homes.

Dear God! All most people see is regulations saving people. Regulations keeping people safe. First, of course, there is no guarantee that these regulations would in fact be successful in preventing those rare deaths. Second, according to another of my intro to Microeconomics textbooks, this one written by Boyes & Melvin (7th Ed.), many economists believe that enacting and complying with regulations will cause more deaths than they prevent if the costs to doing so go past a certain amount. (Or one could see this amount as the money people no longer have for income, reducing the amount spent on healthcare, education, whatever.) Apparently studies calculated that amount at $8.4 million in the United States. Using numbers from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, which has been required to run cost-benefit analyses on silly regulations since I believe the Gingrich Revolution (though I could be wrong) because of the desire to expose how lame tree-monitoring regulations are, we see the following:

Regulation of grain dust saves 4 lives per year at a cost of $5.3 million. Uranium mine regulations save 1.1 lives per year at a cost of $6.9 million. Benzene: 3.8 lives, $17.1 million. Glass plants: 0.11 lives, $19.2 million. Ethylene oxide: 2.8 lives, $25.6 million. Copper smelters: 0.06 lives, $26.5 million. Uranium mill tailings, active, 2.1 lives, $53 million. Low-arsenic cooper: 0.08 lives, $764 million. Land disposal: 2.52 lives, $3.5 billion. Formaldehyde: 0.01 lives, $72 billion.

As this textbook points out, some programs seem to have a net benefit for society, such as a program to detect and treat breast cancer among women over the age of 50, since it has a cost of $15,000/yr per life saved. Not bad. But if you look at the excerpted travesties above, it’s hard to believe a legislature of any time can stand pat and let all of these atrocious regulations go on. But they do. It needn’t be so — and that is where the UES school must come in. It must teach the people about the pernicious, unseen effects of regulation as well and strip them of their innocent, always-helpful and caring image so long cultivated by Democrats and recently nurtured by Republicans once more as well

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