It’s sad how our modern world drives people to incredible ends to simply avoid being liable for things. We pay out the ass for insurance for driving automobiles, as it is the law to pay someone else to be liable. I have something called “personal liability insurance” that supposedly insures me in case I accidentally break something owned by someone else, as long as I wasn’t borrowing it or something (essentially it has to be an accident with something that was not in my ‘possession’). How crazy is that?

Here in Germany, as I have found out recently, people shovel their sidewalks here – not out of civic duty – but to avoid being sued. You see, if someone slips on the sidewalk in front of your house, although the sidewalk isn’t your property (it belongs to the city) – you are liable for paying damages to the victim. That’s right! So why aren’t people “falling” on sidewalks by the thousands, to take advantage of this interesting and common liability?

It poses an interesting situation: suppose I am in the US for the holidays, and it snows while I’m gone? Next, Mr. or Mrs. Oldperson decides to take a stroll, and falls in front of my house (or even younger Mr. Fraudulent decided to ‘fall’ for some holiday spending cash). Soon after, I get home, and have a $100,000 bill in my mailbox.

But it’s completely fair, and – according to German law – completely possible. They have a law written just for it. Even if I claim that the fine young gentleman that I paid to shovel my sidewalk while I was gone was sick, or himself on a vacation, it doesn’t matter – I’m $100k in debt.

Strange what the Germans here worry about. But, this is one of those things that they do. I guess someone should create an insurance that frees people from all liability against accidents or claims of any type related to not shoveling the sidewalk in front of your house in the winter. They’d make a fortune here in Germany, now doubt about it, with people like my neighbor that doesn’t do it anyways and would probably jump on it as soon as she found out it existed. Hell, it probably already does.