The main difference is that if an ebay seller screws up your order of pogs , nobody dies.
Depends on what is selling. There are plenty of things that you could buy off ebay that are capable of killing you if they're defective.
If you a going to be carrying passengers, you'd better have a good driving record, a chauffeur's license and a vehicle that receives regular mandated safety inspection.
Sounds good, although someone with a nasty car will get bad feedback, etc. Problem should take care of itself.
And no, you can't trust the free market to self regulate. We've had airlines literally delay the installation of fixes to critical safety flaws because downing the jet to make the repairs cost too much time/money and hundreds have died as a result. If left entirely to the free market, the airlines would cut fleet maintenance to the absolute minimum to keeps the airplane in the sky, and if one of them falls from the sky every so often and crashes due to poor maintenance, it would still be cheaper to pay off the victims than to replace parts at the proper intervals.
And, yet, airplane crashes still happen. The reason is that everybody still makes the calculation that you're talking about there, and we rely on lawsuit judgements to make it more expensive to pay off the victims.
You're going to hate this part: you make the exact same judgement every time you get into a car. You don't have to drive anywhere, but you choose to do so even though thousands of people die in car accidents each year. Many are pedestrians who get hit by cars. If you truly cared about them you would quit driving.
Right?
No, you've decided - whether consciously or not - that the risk is worth it to you to get to the store in 5 minutes instead of an hour.
The libertarians would say the answer to this is to choose an airline with the lowest fatality rate.
Yep. I usually fly Southwest.
