Safetyism

Suppose that X percent of the children will receive serious injuries if they play in this particular playground and 2X percent will receive equally serious injuries if they stay home. Since no place is 100 percent safe, and none can be made 100 percent safe, the only meaningful question is the relative safety of one place compared to another and the cost of making either place safer by a given amount. Our natural inclination may be to want to make every place as safe as possible but in reality no one does that when they must pay the costs themselves. We are willing to pay for brakes in our cars, but having a second set of brakes in case the first set fails would make us safer still. 

A new kind of institution for transferring risk has arisen in recent times. Since government agencies such as the National Highway Safety Administration do not charge directly for their services as do mutual aid societies or insurance companies, they must collect the money needed to support themselves from lawsuits, donations, or taxes. Put differently, their only money-making product or service is fear—and their incentives are to induce as much fear as possible in jurors, legislators, and the general public. Whereas individuals weighing risks for themselves are restrained in how much risk reduction they will seek by the costs, there are no such restraints on the amount of risk reduction sought by those whose risk reduction is paid for with other people's money. Nor is there any such inherent restraint on how much fear they will generate from a given risk or how much credit they will claim for whatever risk reduction may take place, regardless of what the facts may be. 

—Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics.