What a self serving self important dick.
(No, not me, Ralph)
I love this article.
"Saint Ralph's" Original Sin
He built an empire on a shaky factual foundation.
By Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for <http://www.reason.com> Reason
http://www.nationalreview.com/images/I.gifn 1965, as a brash and energetic
young lawyer, Ralph Nader famously charged that American automakers, in the
blind pursuit of corporate profits, were knowingly manufacturing cars that
endangered public safety. According to the canonical version of the story,
Nader exposed this alleged corporate infamy in his book Unsafe at Any Speed:
The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. His "poster child" for
hazardous vehicles was GM's sporty Corvair. Breaking with long standing
American tradition, GM engineers had emulated European competitors, Porsche
and Volkswagen, by putting the Corvair's engine in the rear. The car was a
big hit with the public. Nader, however, saw perfidy and claimed that the
design was flawed, causing the Corvair to fishtail easily and to roll over
when cornering sharply.
Nader's wild charges might have been lost to history except that half-witted
GM executives hired private detectives to pry into Nader's personal and
financial life. The GM executives even schemed to compromise Nader by trying
to tempt him with hookers. Of course, these underhanded activities, when
they were revealed in The New Republic, lent immediate credence to Nader's
claims. An outraged Senator Abraham Ribicoff held hearings on auto safety
that eventually resulted in legislation creating the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the U.S. Department of
Transportation. Nader has been a leftist icon ever since. The New Republic
later went so far as to dub him "Saint Ralph."
There's one problem with this little morality tale of the activist David vs.
the corporate Goliath: David's data were false.
Seven years after the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, a definitive study
by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration - the very agency
Nader's book conjured into existence - concluded, in July 1972, that
contrary to Nader's charges, the '60-'63 Chevrolet Corvair models were at
least as safe as comparable models of other cars sold in the same period.
The study also found, after extensive tests of the '63 Corvair and five
other compact cars of various makes, that Corvair's handling in sharp turns
was no more dangerous that that of other cars and did not result in abnormal
potential loss of control. NHTSA concluded that the available accident data
indicated that the rollover rate of the '60-63 Corvair was comparable to
those of other light domestic cars.
Never mind: Being wrong on the Corvair hasn't hurt Nader's career one bit.
Since the Corvair fiasco, Nader has created a vast empire of interlocking
special-interest groups that terrorize the business community almost as
effectively as the trial lawyers do. Nader, like so many other movement
leaders on the Left, got his start by scaremongering the public with bogus
facts. He should feel right at home in the Green Party.
Wm. Severin Thompson
~iii<O
<mailto:wsthompson@thicko.com> wsthompson@thicko.com
<http://www.thicko.com/> www.thicko.com
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type image/gif which had a name of
image001.gif]
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type image/png which had a name of
image002.png]
_______________________________________________
Support Team.Net http://www.team.net/donate.html
Team-thicko mailing list
http://autox.team.net/mailman/listinfo/team-thicko
http://www.team.net/archive
|