The Real Reason for the Tragedy of the Titanic
The disaster is often seen as a tale of hubris, social stratification and capitalist excess. The truth is considerably more sobering.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577337923643095442.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Yet another document that somehow failed to get published when I was done with it…
At the accident’s core is this reality: British regulators assumed responsibility for lifeboat numbers and then botched that responsibility. With a close reading of the evidence, it is hard not to see the Titanic disaster as a tragic example of government failure.
Beins as how this is the WSJ the only ‘solution’ that appears in the offing is to eliminate government regulation. I guess the idea is that the White Star Line would have put in the extra life boats out of fear of being sued into bankruptcy, but didn’t because regulation didn’t require it. This ignores, of course, the likely reality that the WSL would simply have paid the necessary bribes to make the whole legal problem go away (one can’t reasonably presume that by doing away with most regulation we don’t also do away with all regulation and most law) and wouldn’t have suffered a penny more than they did with the government regulation.
Of course, the real solution would have been to require that the damn government regulators update their regulations on a regular and on-going basis, but imagine how easy it would have been for the shipping lines to campaign against any updated regulations they perceived as too expensive. The problem isn’t with the concept of government, the problem is with the implementation of government!
