Laws that Penalize for Your ProtectionPosted on 05/23/2010
Seatbelt laws are intended to generate revenue, not protect drivers and passengers in the unlikely event of a traffic accident that is so heinous in the impact that we go through the windshield. The law doesn't keep anyone safe. The wearing of a seatbelt does. Knowing a penalty for being caught doing something against a bad law might be a small incentive to those drivers who conform as part of their personality, but for nonconformists, such an intrusion aggravates to the point of defiance.
We all know we could go through a windshield if we're not strapped in and hit an object while cruising along at a high rate of speed. (Note: great slow-mo scene in Zombieland of just such an outcome.) If a potential crushed skull isn't enough to convince us to wear a seatbelt, a fine won't either.
Each personal decision the government penalizes, for the public good, moves us further from freedom and closer to totalitarianism. Introducing penalties for daily personal acts occur in small steps and are spin doctored as reasonable protections, thereby permitting enforced compliance because not enough people protest.
Click it or TicketPosted on 06/03/2010
Over Memorial Day weekend, and the campaign for Click it or Ticket was in full swing.
Police, accepting federal funding to advertise the Click It or Ticket public service announcements on TV, billboards, in the print media, and on the Internet, are forced to pull drivers over for the sole suspected offense of not wearing their seatbelts and then fining them if they weren't. The cost of such campaigning offsets the money brought in from the fines, while diverting trooper attention from other more serious crimes can’t be a good use of law enforcement resources.
Not wearing a seatbelt doesn’t cause accidents. Then I thought about the children passengers in vehicles who don’t have volition in deciding whether they want to chance not being strapped into a child seat for their own protection. People invariably think of the children of irresponsible parents, justifying all acts of restrictive government coercion because children must be protected, at all costs to adults. But tickets are written to thousands upon thousands of drivers who don’t have children or infant passengers at the time of the personal safety choice-turned-offense.
Checking to see if drivers are strapped in also gives law enforcement probable cause to search the drivers and passengers for other offenses, such as transporting nonfamilial juveniles across state lines for criminal purposes or drug trafficking. Also incidental to the ostensible seatbelt check is the check for a valid driver’s registration, license, and proof of insurance. A single purported "public safety" law disarms probable cause protections.
The federal government, in return for funding the Click It or Ticket campaign, ties additional state and local funding up in a quota system for the number of seatbelt tickets that local police are able to issue.
Strangers force you to take care of yourself because they derive a monetary benefit from their restrictions. There’s money involved in socialized medicine. Insurance companies pay more in hospital fees for insured clients who sustain heavier damage and trauma in car accidents, so it is to the benefit of all who buy insurance, which is a pooled system of risk, to minimize hospital stays as a result of car accidents. Might powerful insurance lobbies, motivated by placating stockholders, have paid federal law and policy makers to link federal funding to local levels to seatbelt fine quotas?
Psychologically, some drivers will buckle up to avoid the adverse
penalty of potentially receiving a $30 ticket. Some people can be conditioned,
accepting that the known
penalty of a possible fine is a more imminent and ominous and likely event than an accident.
Does such a monetary penalty persuade drivers to protect themselves by wearing their belts,
thereby averting terrible health consequences?
Do the police really care about strangers in cars who may sustain greater physical trauma because they weren’t wearing their seatbelt? Maybe the concept of paternal authority has trickled down from a socialistic government to police enforcement institutions. The government has become a nanny state and “since the government forces responsible people to pay for the actions of the irresponsible, forcing the irresponsible to shape up becomes easier to justify” (Balaker [Ref]).
In reality, those who don’t buckle up, if they are caught and fined, don't subsidize the greater health care costs of other drivers who also don’t buckle up if they're in a horrendous car accident and sustain horrible injuries. That's a lot of ifs that must fall into place like the plot of a well-crafted thriller novel, which is complete fiction. The supposition that revenue from the Click It or Ticket campaign could possibly help defray hospitalization costs, if that were a secondary justification, is highly questionable. The hope is that all money generated goes toward the overhead of paying for the implementation of the program, paying all of those advertisers that the Federal government had to pay, and that there'll be a few dollars left over for the police departments to pay the costs of their increasingly expensive operations.
However, any law that criminalizes personal choice to use or not use available safety or any other service is an encroachment on freedom. All drivers who don’t want to wear seatbelts do so at the primary risk of being ticketed, and the secondary, uncertain risk of sustaining worse health consequences in the event of a car accident. And taxpayers are paying to be told to belt up and then paying again if they’re caught beltless.
Repeal this law. The responsibility for making our
own choices shouldn't be dependent on the external variable of government
penalty.
Helmet Laws
Noggin protection has the unintended consequence of allowing motorcyclists to think clearly about the nature of having their freedom of clothing choice stripped by a lawmaker.
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