Legalized irresponsibility

Suppose you sent your children to an organization that negligently caused them to be injured, incurring large medical bills. Would it seem unreasonable to expect that organization to admit their negligence and foot the medical costs? If they didn't do so willingly, you might well file a lawsuit to cover the damages. That sort of scenario plays out every day, and damages usually get paid if the organization is truly negligent.

Except... when the organization is the Minneapolis Public School system, the largest in Minnesota. Their response to such a situation? "We have immunity from such lawsuits". Take your children, their injuries, the medical costs, and just lump it.

How can they claim immunity? They discovered an obscure piece of legislation from 1969 that should have been updated or removed but wasn't. It allowed MPS to claim immunity from liability, which also left them free to not purchase liability insurance. How obscure was the law? Evidently MPS was the only district in the state that knew about it, and they carefully avoided telling anyone else. They knew that if the law came to the attention of other districts, they would use it too, causing an outcry that would result in rescinding it. So... they kept it quiet, until the inevitable happened, and the children of two families ran headlong into it.

The injuries happened during an exercise that, in retrospect, seems almost designed to cause problems; having children run around in a dark room, trying to avoid the flashlight beams from each other. Two girls rammed head-first into each other, a not-surprising outcome for running in the dark.

This, unfortunately, is a vivid and typical example of government in action. For most people, it is virtually impossible to avoid sending children to a "public" government school. We are forced to support those schools with our taxes, whether we like it or not, and whether we have children or not. To send our children to a private school, we must still pay for the public schools. Even if we choose to homeschool our children ourselves, as an ever-increasing number of people are doing, we are still paying the same taxes to support the schools our children don't attend. So most of us are forced to send our kids off to public schools.

"It's for the kids" is a mantra the school systems use frequently... especially when they want more tax money. As citizens and parents, we are expected to think about public schools as "our" schools, and of ourselves as part of the school's "community". Here's a quote from the Community section of the website of the Minneapolis Public School system

Our goal is to keep our community informed about various school matters, aware of news and happenings, and engaged in various events district-wide. We are determined to get these messages across through various communications channels, including the use of our very-own radio station KBEM 88.5 FM, as well as our TV station, Cable Channel 15.

Don't they make it all sound cozy and friendly? Keep our community informed? MPS sure used their resources to inform parents about their intent to avoid responsibility for negligent injuries, didn't they?

It isn't just the government schools to blame for this shameful position... the legislature fouled up repeatedly to make it possible. The 1969 legislation shouldn't have been there in the first place, but legislators did "sunset" the immunity after a year. That didn't work either, for when, 30 years later, they went back to delete obsolete laws, they deleted the sunset but not the immunity law, putting the original immunity back into force.

We all make mistakes, and, as private citizens, we have to pay for them. For example, we're required by law to carry liability insurance on our auto policies. If we negligently injure others, we can rightfully be sued for damages. Most of us would do so without laws or lawsuits, as part of our personal moral code.

Government plays by different rules. Many parts of government claim immunity for their actions, but we usually don't know about it until it hits us in the face personally. When you or I make a bad investment or choose a business path that doesn't work, we suffer the consequences. When government does the same, it usually just takes even more money from us to cover up their bad judgement. With no consequences to face, government makes the same stupid mistakes over and over.

Of course, even when the government action is not a mistake, but a deliberate, even immoral, act, the same results occur... no consequences and no change. Sometimes government's actions are obviously planned deceptions, such as the repeated financial bailouts of "public" arenas.

Government is but one of many organizations we deal with on a daily basis, but it is unique in that it holds itself immune from its own actions. For each of us, as individuals, it thus makes great sense to deal with private, responsible entities rather than with government. It is the only way we can be assured of being treated fairly and justly. Logical as that is, government has intruded into almost every aspect of our lives, driving away private options, often leaving us no choice but to deal with them, even when we know that we cannot count on being treated justly.