I agree. Even extremely safe languages like Ada, which have found most of their use in safety-critical situations like in plane avionics and medical equipment, allow the programmer to do "unchecked conversions," the equivalent of a static_cast.

It would actually be insane for const to forbid the programmer from doing any of these things. A certain amount of a language and its features is to protect your program from other programmers, to communicate your idea and vision about the code. In that way, const is amazingly useful.