The next time you’re wondering why airline ticket prices are so high, after you consider rising oil prices and government regulation, add frivolous lawsuits to your list.

A woman has sued American Airlines for serving peanuts on a flight despite her four-year-old son’s allergy to peanuts and her notification to the airline of the allergy.  She claims she was assured several times that peanuts would not be served. But she says flight attendants changed the plan without notice.

It is true that an allergic reaction to peanuts can range from a minor irritation to a life-threatening condition. Even people who have only had a mild reaction in the past are at risk of a more serious future reaction.  And peanut allergies can be set off by inhalation, ingestion, and sometimes through direct skin contact. It has also been shown that airplanes can harbor peanut protein in their air filters.

Here is the most important point: a search of both PeanutAllergy.com and The Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, and the CDC will result in no documented cases of fatal anaphylactic reaction for direct skin contact or inhalation.  In other words no one has died as the peanut fascists would like us to believe so they can justify this tyranny of the minority.

The Mayo Clinic lists ways to keep kids safe from these allergies. These steps include all logical and reasonable ways to minimize risks and are not all that unusual or hard to follow.  I mean, how hard is it to keep your child, who’s sitting right next to you from eating peanuts? How about don’t feed him any! 

And if she was honestly so concerned about the problem through air filtering systems, she shouldn’t even be taking the flight in the first place.

Please tell me what does this lawsuit achieve besides hurting the airline, showing the ugly selfishness of a parent teaching the wrong lessons to her kid and lining the pockets of some greedy attorney who will make most of the settlement money the airline offers to get this thing behind them? What a great racket for the attorney! This endorses the narcissism, cowardice, victimhood and lack of personal responsibility that are the character of so many citizens and lawyers today.

How about this? Teach your child not to eat peanuts and avoid them. Kids cannot avoid all contact with peanuts, like everything else in life it’s a matter of balancing risks, at some point, you just have to go out and live.

If people like this get their way and the lawyers who support them make all the money they are after by doing this “in the public interest,” the entire airport should be declared a peanut free zone whenever you fly. We’ll even spend the money to clean the air filters no one will suffer any allergic reaction.  What we will suffer from is the effects of overbearing protectionism.   And of course businesses will pass the costs of lawsuits to the consumer.  In the case of airlines, this will cut into the already thin profit margins and hurt everyday people who need to travel.

This one will cost the rest of us.  It’s too bad her lawsuit is not worth peanuts.