Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Impact of Government Regulatory, Tax and Legal Policy: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Technology of the Committee on Science U. S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, First Session, September 28, 1995
Last year, the faa, under an exemption granted by Congress, put in a line at the encouragement of the Administration in a con tract for transceivers, in which they said they had all the detailed specifications written in stone the way they usually are. And then they said, and if you have any better ideas, let us know. This is not permitted under the federal acquisitions regulations.
Someone came in and said, I think I could do the same job with a different kind of machine at much lower price. And sure enough, they came in with a machine that did the same job at 28 percent of the cost.
That's the sort of thing that we're missing out on at dod and everywhere else every day because of the rigidity of the system, again. And one of the side costs of that is that government can't lead in what Mr. Tanner was saying it should be leading, which is innovation, which it has always had in this century an important role in doing.
There was a reference to litigation and fear. Again, this is not a big issue in the computer and software industry. It's a huge issue in the health care industry and somewhere in aeronautics.
When there's no institution in the country who views it as their job to safeguard the reasonableness of decisions made by people, any innovation is an invitation to liability because every positive human act involves risk. In fact, I would say that risk is half of life.
And we have a system now where if there is a risk and it doesn't work out, you' can be sued and generally be held liable because judges in courts don't view it as their role to safeguard reasonable ness. They throw everything at the jury.
We need tort reform and we need a coherent national policy as to what it means to safeguard the reasonableness of decisions made by people on the spot.
The system is out of control, not because we have that much more litigation. It's because no one making decisions on the spot not business, not doctors engaging in deciding whether to do a test - has any confidence that the institutions of our government will protect them in the inevitable circumstance that things don't work out some of the time.
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