Feds to trucking co.: You can’t fire the drunk, but you’re liable for him

By David McElroy · September 2, 2011

If you wonder why many business people are walking away from business today, look no further than the case in which a trucking company has been told it must employ alcoholics to drive its trucks, but the company is also responsible if one of them gets drunk and has an accident.

This is the Catch-22 that the federal government has thrust upon Old Dominion Freight Line. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says Old Dominion violated the Americans with Disabilities Act when it removed a trucker from a driving position after management found out he had a drinking problem, so the EEOC has sued the company. Why would anyone stay in the trucking business with that sort of liability?

You might remember the story I had not long ago about Ronnie Bryant, the coal mine operator who announced at a public environmental meeting that he was backing out of plans to open a coal mine. In the comments underneath that story, there were multiple other people who said they had either gotten out of business for similar reasons or who were in the process of getting out. Business people are tired of being handed impossible regulations and contradictory rules. They’re tired of being treated like borderline criminals or suspect at best.

How long can a society survive when its government does its best to destroy the engine of commerce in the society? Wealth isn’t a static thing. It has to be created constantly, and the federal and state governments are making it more and more difficult to create wealth. A society that’s not creating wealth is one with declining living standards and angry people. Sadly, most people in this country have been so brainwashed into accepting the various rules and regulations that they support the actions that are destroying their own society.

If you’re a company, what do you do? You do everything in your power to weed out the drunks before they get behind the wheel of your truck — and hope you don’t get caught for “illegal discrimination” as you weed them out — or you simply turn someone loose with an expensive truck that can kill dozens of people very easily under the right circumstances. When an idiotic policy such as this results in a death and an inevitable lawsuit, everyone will blame the company for “not caring about the public.” But the company can only comply — and pay off the inevitable lawsuits — or go out of business.

More and more people are deciding it’s not worth doing business in this environment. I don’t blame them. The saddest part is that as the economy continues to fall apart in the future — as good people refuse to operate in these conditions — politicians are going to call it a market failure and say it’s evidence they need to plan more from the top down.

The market isn’t isn’t failing. The market does an excellent job of regulating this sort of thing on its own. The free market really works. We ought to actually let the market do its job.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts