Better safe than sorry
State forces property owners to be responsible for ensuring pool safety
By Joanna Dehn Beresford 08/26/2010
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Basically, this country's founders never intended for the government to practice a perpetually expanding nanny-power to improve (or otherwise maintain) their own opulent lifestyles while taxing a significant minority of more economically challenged, revenue sources right out of an otherwise lucrative market. So Sacramento "terristically" tweeks its proactive definition of "SAFETY" into a political golden goose that they are now only beginning to milk dry until it turns into an economic dustbowl. Whenever Sacramento comes to the rescue, it invariably seems that more people end up being out of work and drowning in debt.
In any event, this is the way I feel it should be left alone. If a private California property owner has (or wants) a pool on their appropriately fenced-in property and somebody then trespasses and drowns, well, Caveat Emptor ... that trespasser functionally bought himself a final water-ride ticket with his illegal trespassing conduct.
As for approved and consenting adults? Perhaps an optional warning sign should be appropriate to inform the casual visitor of any potential danger regardless of whether they've been given permission to use the pool. If non-resident children also permissively visit the property, then the property owner would be wise to install an affective infrastructure of safety while also making sure that other people's children are not there without parental consent.
But to command (with the passage of time what will eventually include) ALL California swimming pool owners to comply with a single, STRICTEST safety standard is a vast regulatory tax assault on the greater public that will only severely injure yet another "homegrown" construction industry still operating in our gold-plated State. But what our own homegrown politicians in Sacramento, who eventually noticed that California has more private pools than the rest of the world combined, only saw was payraise gold.
Ultimately, this (eventual) criminalization of most swimming pool operations in the State is yet a more drastic bureaucratic oppression of personal property rights.
(*http://www.cdph.ca.gov/data/indicators/goals/Documents/objective1529.pdf In a place where the public access to infrastructure and education has noticably been more magnanimous since 1970, it is important to note that percentage-wise to race, more whites drown in California than Blacks)
DanD
Hey, guess what, gang;
Almost two score years ago I escaped from East, East Texas (With Shreveport at the center of that planetary armpit hole). It's a place where bigotry is strong and class oppression standard for whatever "minority" label or physical characteristic made a person marked.
It is important to note that ALL the drowned persons referred to at the top of this article were Black. Historically, Black people in America -- as a distinct minority class -- were (especially after WWII, when there developed a national swimming-pool boom) legally and economically dissuaded from either adopting, or otherwise evolving as a part of our greater nation's water culture of athletic development.
And while Jim Crow laws that prohibited Black people from swimming in the same, government-managed municipal (or even private) pools that were being enjoyed by America's separate-but-equal white taxpayers (thereby closing the vast majority of public and private "swimming holes" to most of America's former chattel-class) were formally discarded (mostly) in the 70s, that same non-availability also continues to creep across the current generational gap as a culturally-predisposed, non-priority education among most families of recent (the last four centuries or so) African origins. But then again, THAT is Louisiana ... and NOT way over here at the "Left Coast."*
For California's government (or perhaps in this instance, only the writer, which still does not delimit the comparative stupidity) to use the particular example above as a Causus Belli to wage punitive tax war against average home-owning citizens of the Golden State, is really a distinct case of institutional overkill.
In any event, what this regulatory over-expansion of "Big Brother" law really does is to create a "safety" industry in California where one was never really needed, OR ASKED-FOR, before. I mean, that's all we need in California, more extremely well (or otherwise over) paid bureaucrats. The way I see it in my 53rd year, yeah, stupid people (and their children) drown ... but if we -- as a species -- keep our own subspecies idiot-class of (otherwise minimally educated) non-swimming pond-divers from killing itself off under fundamentally natural pool conditions, we will all also eventually be nanny-state drowned in our own collateral sink-hole of stupidly surviving tax burdens(well, maybe I'm sounding just a bit too harsh).
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