Toyota Mess Is the Price We Pay for a Modern World

Charles Krauthammer doesn't want to let Toyota off the hook for its dangerous cars, but he sees such "wondrous and potentially lethal" products as inseparable from the modern world. Problems are inevitable, and if we over-react and shut down all the factories over every complaint, "we'd have no industrial society at all." It's all about finding the right balance, he writes, but "it's not an easy calculation."

"It is no disrespect to the memory of those killed, and the sorrow of those left behind, to simply admit that even the highest technology produced by the world's finest companies can be fallible and fatal, and that the intelligent response is not rage and retribution but sober remediation and recognition of the very high price we pay—willingly pay—for modernity with all its wondrous, dangerous bounty," Krauthammer writes in the Washington Post. (More Toyota recall stories.)