loquitur

as I said, where workers are fungible that might be true. Most workers aren't fungible.

And what I wrote about my firm is also true for the unskilled people, the ones in the mail room and file room.

Ever been an employer, Filtherton? If you haven't, then you really are just making assumptions. Taking care of your employees makes very good business sense. I commend to you an interview with Richard Branson, who claims to have built his Virgin empire on taking care of his employees.

One other thing: from saying that employers should provide safe work environments it doesn't follow that OSHA is necessary. I'm with you that there have to be sanctions for injuring your workers, but we have them already. It's called workers comp laws. Companies that don't take care of the safety of workers can get socked, and I mean socked. Is that the "forcing" you're talking about?

What's apparent to me is that you're making generalizations and advocating government action based on the generalization. That might be the only way policy gets made, but surely you see that that underscores what a blunt instrument government is: you make policy for everyone based on what a subset does. That's how regulatory burdens got started and why there are squadrons of my fellow lawyers getting rich by helping people and companies navigate regulatory minefields (which is not, by any stretch, an economically productive activity).

Rekna, you're presuming there aren't any other sanctions. There are. And last time I looked, WalMart wasn't going begging for workers. It's a big economy, about $15 trillion last I looked, or something like that. No one HAS to work at WalMart.

As for Enron, there is no amount of regulation that would have stopped that. I had a conv once with the then-head of the criminal division at the Justice Dept, and he admitted to me that even if Sarbanes-Oxley had been in place 10 years ago, it would not have stopped the Enron fraud and it would not have stopped the WorldCom fraud. There is no legislation or regulation that will stop bad people who are intent on doing bad things from doing them (that's why we still have murderers despite laws against it). We do have fraud laws, and those laws were applied, and the bad guys are now in jail. But I'll be damned if I'll ever advocated putting all sorts of obstacles in front of the GEs and Amgens of the world merely because Scott Sullivan and Andy Fastow are crooks. That's lunacy, and a recipe for killing the economy.