What a fine line we dance when deciding what level of government involvement we want in our lives.
Like so many other things in life that we’d prefer to have in black and white, it just isn’t. And the older I get, the less clear those lines are and the less interested I am in getting overwrought about someone else’s position.
I was reminded of this last week after, of all things, an email exchange with an unhappy reader over a sports event. We were unable to cover a sports story that was important to him. And in fairness to the reader, it was a good story.
We were talking about the difficulties in covering so many different schools and sports because different people have different ideas of what’s important. The soccer family thinks we spend too much time on baseball, etc.
Later, we were finalizing weekend editorials and the proposed parasailing regulations came up. The legislation basically puts safety guidelines on the companies and details insurance, equipment and license requirements, along with weather conditions that would force operations to temporarily stop.
The legislation came after some deadly and near-fatal accidents, including two teenage girls visiting Panama City Beach who were critically injured last year when their tow line snapped and they were at the mercy of gusting winds that threw them into a condo balcony and then dumped them into a parking lot.
This is an industry that has been largely unregulated and which, mathematically, has very low incidents of mishaps resulting in injury or death. But when it goes wrong, it goes really, really wrong. When the teens on Panama City Beach were injured last year and it was reported there basically weren’t any regulations on parasailers, I was astounded.
Part of the astonishment was that there was anything left out there that government hadn’t gotten its claws into. But part of it was disbelief that out of all the things government has a hand in, how in the world could something as potentially dangerous as parasailing not be regulated?
When the U.S. Coast Guard or state officers can board your boat at will to see if you have regulation life jackets, how could they not have rules on how thick the ropes on parasailing boats must be, or be able to inspect the tow equipment?
Despite all of that, when I saw the headline Friday, “Senate OKs parasailing regulations,” my first reaction was basically, “Oh great, here we go again, government intervention.”
It is a clash of principle and reality that seems to have become more pronounced for me.
Standing only on principles, the last thing we need is government involvement in any business, unless our goal is to harm that business. A little involvement becomes more involvement which turns into licenses and fees and inspections and costs, with an end result that the ones with the money dominate the business and it’s not financially feasible for a newcomer to break into it.
But the reality is that there are some things that just have to be regulated. It’s not like a motorcycle helmet law where the individual knows if he or she chooses not to wear a helmet it could be fatal; a person signing up for a parasail ride just kind of assumes it is safe or why would everyone be doing it?
That’s what I thought when I took my first parasail flight a few years ago, something I would not have done had I realized no one oversaw how they do business or keep their equipment.
So I don’t like government telling me what to do, but like it when it tells others what to do when it makes sense to me, basically. And what makes sense to me doesn’t necessarily make sense to the next person. And the guess here is that we’re all kind of like that, whether we admit it or not.
So we elect people to figure that out for us and complain when their view of what government should do is different than ours. And we wait until election time to either vote them back in if they share or views, or vote them out if they don’t.
Short of doing it the way I’d like every time, that’s a system with which I can live.