Overprotected or not?

Overprotected or not? 

Coming from the United States, I received a small bottle of water and a bag of peanuts from the flight attendant. On the bottle, as usual, there was the comforting information that its calorie content was zero, it would be very worrying if that were not the case. However, the legend of the bag drove me crazy, when I read that to obtain its nutritional information, I had to write to the address indicated there. What was I doing at 35,000 feet, eating it or not? This made me reflect on the incredible number of regulations designed to protect the consumer.

We read that in Japan there is great concern because its people have adopted excessively exaggerated hygiene customs, which could reduce their resistance to microbes. Would a possible Darwinian evolution, forcing the Japanese to live in air bubbles, also apply to the overprotection of the American consumer?

I went to my sister, who because she was a doctor, I considered her to be the great guru of this epidemic of crazy rules and other stupidities of the gringos, being married to one of them, to ask her confidentially, without my brother-in-law finding out: What kind of society could require protecting its citizens in such a way? Are they so gross? Her answers were enlightening, so I'll tell you what I deduced from them.

In international trade, the United States is considered an open country, with the lowest tariffs in the world. Which is not necessarily true, if we consider that their average tariffs are made up of some of 0%, applied to products of little commercial significance, such as a nuclear reactor, and others very high, of 60%, applied to products, which for protect their own, they want to scare away, like orange concentrate.

Just as in commerce, reality does not coincide with common belief, in terms of regulations on quality, content and form of use, the United States does not have all the overprotection that we believe, suffering sometimes from absolute lack of protection.

In my sister's opinion, it is not that Americans are brutes (for my family history records, my brother-in-law has never seemed that way to me) the fact is that all the regulations that we observe in that country only constitute a weak line of defense, in the face of the legal uncertainty that has been created by the addiction of its judicial system to lawsuits. She tells me that the terror is so great that even in baby strollers there are instructions that recommend taking the baby out before folding him. In ironing, they insist on not ironing the clothes while they are on.

The lawsuits and their damages are not fictions. You can demonstrate this by asking any shareholder of a tobacco company in the United States what they think about legal uncertainty. You will surely get very interesting answers, in terms of monetary damages per capita. Likewise, we see that the insurance premiums, which doctors must pay to defend themselves, exceed the annual salary of many Venezuelan doctors. We know how difficult it can be for us to find a trustworthy doctor, but for American doctors, it is probably even more difficult to find a trustworthy patient.

We see in the news that in Florida they want to sue for the annulment of the electoral result, alleging that 20,000 voters were supposedly confused. Because of the difficulty they have in agreeing on who should be their next president, faced with a vote divided 50-50, I believe that those who are truly confused are many more, they are all the voters. Maybe they should outsource their government. Disney?

Speaking of legal security and trade openness, these were recently evaluated in the 2001 Economic Freedom Index of the Heritage Foundation, where Venezuela has once again earned being in the basement, with number 115 and the United States with 5. That is why, as a Venezuelan trying to get the point across, today I am spitting somewhat towards the north, instead of just straight up.

Translated by Google (and me) from an OpEd in Venezuela