After my post this morning about the 9/11 widow who spent almost all of her multimillion government issued victim’s compensation, I began an email argument with an exceptionally annoying lawyer whose last name just so happens to be the same word as an exceptionally annoying common household insect.

I reprint his original response here:

Why is $5mm absurd as compensation for a lost life and in exchange for giving up the right not to sue the airlines and others for their negligence—particularly with respect to security? That’s a very typical amount for a lost life. If you look at the amounts of compensation people accept for risk, it’s on par with what people take
(statistically) for a 1% increase in mortality for instance. So it just seems like a lot to you, but you have no real basis for saying so. Indeed, for a bond trader, the lost income alone is likely in the millions.

I wrote back:

Seems like a lot of money to give in one check. Social security pays out over years — why not pay this out over time also? And the guy was making low six figures when he died — I don’t mean to be disrespectful to him, but he was a long way away from 5 mil. As for it being a payoff for giving up the right to sue — that’s different, and I didn’t know that.
But the real problem is that a woman who has lost her husband has had her life thrown into complete disarray. The big government/liberal approach is to throw a big check at her. Clearly, money wasn’t the answer.

One of his 10 responses said I was “typical of the knee-jerk regime that has prevailed at NR for the last 5-7 years or so.” So that’s good, right?