When new seat belt laws drew fire as a violation of personal freedom (2020)
history.com
history.com
Ironically, airbags were developed to _replace_ seatbelts as people like Ralph Nader thought people could never be convinced to wear them voluntarily.
> 2. Air bags are designed to work with seat belts, not replace them
but accurate regarding the effects of not wearing one:
> If you don’t wear your seat belt, you could be thrown into a rapidly opening frontal air bag. Such force could injure or even kill you.
Quite a few injuries in low speed crashes are _caused_ by air bag deployment even when you are wearing your seat belt.[1]
This is not to detract from the fact that in high speed or high force crashes, the airbag may be the thing that lets you survive ... assuming you are wearing a seatbelt.
Also, interesting photo in this article[2].
[1]: https://emj.bmj.com/content/19/6/490
[2]: https://cei.org/news_releases/if-auto-safety-defects-are-cri...
Wear a seatbelt. Don't fine and/or imprison those who do not.
If not for the law and the fines, the behavior of not wearing it wouldn’t have changed or, if it did, it would take much longer.
Edit: typo
1. I don't like seat belt laws because I don't like people telling me anything, even if it's the right thing to do and I do it anyways.
2. I don't like seat belt laws because I'm a complete moron and don't want to wear a seat belt even though it's the unambiguously, obviously right thing, I don't like the seat belt itself. I may or may not think that other people should or should not also not wear a seat belt, but I'm mostly worried about personally being penalized for not wearing a seat belt.
3. I don't like seat belt laws because even if I'm wearing my seat belt, police can use it as a tool to pull me over and harass me.
4. I like seat belt laws because they encourage everyone, myself included, to do the right thing, and reduce the societal costs that I'd otherwise have to share if other people wear their seat belts.
"Just do the right thing" works for me as an individual, but I'm not just an individual - I am a member of a society, I contribute insurance premiums and tax payments that financially go towards first responders and health care that might be abused by people who don't do something as obvious as wearing a seat belt - not to mention the emotional, moral and ethical weight of driving around people who might be thrown through their windshield and splatter all over you and your car in a crash.
This is one of those positions which seem reasonable and valid from the inside, but from the outside feels like watching an adult throw a temper tantrum when they don't get their way.
To give a wild-ish example: I am very careful about my teeth and I floss often, but I wouldn't like to have to carry around an authorized list of last cleaning sessions for a random cop to check. Even though it could, on aggregate, save quite a lot of money for dental care in our local single payer system.
It's not about the vegetables, it's about handing away more of your agency to those who can and will abuse it.
Tying into the greater point, I think the environmental shaping by the auto manufacturers has a lot to do with the high compliance rate. A lot of work has gone into belt comfort and seatbelt detection systems are calibrated to the right amount of annoying and undergo UX/focus testing.
IIRC, there are jurisdictions where it's a 'secondary' offence: you can't be pulled over for not wearing them, but if you are pulled over for something else, you can receive a fine on top of whatever the primary charge was.
However, motorcycles do have helmet laws in many states. Really, car drivers should wear helmets also, but good luck getting THAT passed. That's why we have airbags, because no one will wear a helmet in their car.
New Hampshire has no seat belt laws. Some states only require seat belts in the front seat. Some states only require seat belts for drivers and under 18s in the front seat.
Airbags are much superior to helmets, allowing for deceleration to occur over ~10 inches rather than over the ~2 inches provided by a helmet. That allows for a much smaller force to be applied to slowing the head. It would be a massive reduction in safety to replace airbags with helmets.
Rather, we (still) use helmets because motorcyclists can't take advantage of airbags.
Maybe the differing licensing requirements cover that!
It’s like “make <action> without a license federally illegal, while actually going through with licensing requires a ton of arbitrary restrictions by a different government or private sector “
Although this is probably the best example of federalism in our country, instead of a nominally named Federal government simply being the national government
But here's the thing -- I live in a society, and that society has decided that seat belt laws are fine. I don't make a fuss about the seat belts because that's a settled issue in society and isn't a huge burden on me. People making the liberty argument against vaccines should adopt the same stance.
Now vaccines, if YOU don't get vaccinated, you might cause the death of one or more people who you get infected directly or indirectly.
One is a social good, the other is a personal choice.
And if I accidentally pull out in front of you, causing you to crash while not wearing a seatbelt, now I'm traumatized for life and possibly sued into bankruptcy, instead of simply inconvenienced.
Not to mention traumatizing anyone who witnessed you fly through the windshield, and EMT/first responders.
You do not exist in a vacuum.
This of course assumes there’s no one else in the car. If there is, then you turn yourself into a 80kg human meat pinball moving at between 20-80mph, bouncing around the inside of the car. In this case your pretty much guaranteed to kill or seriously injure the other occupants.
That is not the case for covid.
The vaccine means different things for different people. For people with poor immunity its a life-saver. For you people<18 years its largely pointless from a life-saving perspective. It would be like advocating for seatbelts on your lazyboy.
Motorcycles, as dangerous as they are, have a long history and an entrenched industry. Banning them would be a massive expenditure of political capital.
If you're a passenger in the back of a car, and the car stops suddenly in an accident, you will be launched into the seat in front of you. Drivers have died as the result of a rear passenger crushing them. Even seat belts can affect others.
Crash test footage of an unbelted rear passenger - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3InF19dzlM
British safety 'advert' about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw2aevh6oZ8 (Maybe not for the squeamish..)
This is why people really should wear seat belts in taxis and Ubers.
Just wear a seatbelt and put on that helmet.
That doesn't mean it's wrong, just that I find it wholly uncompelling. And I don't exactly oppose seat belt laws either, I just find this justification, uh, perverted maybe? Bizarre? Utterly unconvincing.
Why would you want to subject your friends and loves one to that type of phycological suffering?
The government mandates liability insurance and also mandates safety features that reduce risk for liability insurance providers.
There are reasonable debates be to had if the lines are drawn in the correct places (if motocyclists have to wear helmets, why not other drivers?).
so maybe you can make the case of not getting into vehicles with unbelted persons, however, children among others, often dont have the choice.
Seatbelts save lives and lower the costs for everyone by not required additional resources be spent on treating people unwilling to wear a seatbelt. Just like vaccines.
Would a "libertarian" approach to motorcycle helmet requirements deny social security disability income or medicaid to persons injured in a motorcycle crash without a helmet?
Similar questions apply to car-crash injuries without seat belts, and to serious disease in people who refuse vaccines.
At any rate, I do a lot of road bicycling in New Hampshire, always wearing a helmet. Some motorcyclists, legally, don't wear helmets. Enough of those same motorcyclists disrespect other users of the road that it's wise to pull over until they pass.
We don't all live in places with less than 100 people per square mile.
And often we only really realise that with 30-40 years of hindsight - sometimes more - once the smoke has cleared, once the big companies have stopped their misinformation or lobbying (though I wouldn't be surprised to find out there was still some low-level lobbying for relaxing car safety laws).
> To prove how futile it is to resist government power
I guess the real question is, what is government there for - if not to enact laws that keep people safe and prevent profiteering companies from hoodwinking the common folk to help their own bottom lines?
Because as this pandemic has shown, given anything even slightly inconvenient, people will quite happily hoodwink themselves. Personal liberty is king, social responsibility is treason.
(I'd welcome any examples of small inconveniences to help our fellows that did NOT illicit massive backlashes. I can't think of any ever - no matter how obvious the benefit or small the inconvenience.)
Well put. Are our governments guilty of systematically oppressing us? In many cases yes. That doesn't mean that every government-imposed regulation is brimming with evil. But it is easier (and probably more dopamine-releasing) to believe in a world where the government is the bad guy 100% of the time. It requires less work than acknowledging the occasional good fruits of otherwise inimical regimes.
Putting on my hypotheticals hat, part of it will be:
- not being in the room where it happened, and presuming that the only impetus for change is evil, which feeds into our own deep-seated resistance to change.
- not knowing which voices are being paid to speak (news media, social media, etc) and which voices are completely under-informed - compared with knowing which voices are definitely being paid to speak (government mouthpieces, propaganda) and conflating "don't know whether to trust" with the much simpler "don't trust".
- knowing that sometimes Governments do good things for good reasons, but even then they often end up producing terrible unintended side-effects, or end up being polluted by less-than-wholesome agendas as a price of getting enacted.
So yeah, I totally get that it's hard work overcoming all that to get to a point where you trust anything the government does.
The real irony is that it's often government inaction that we should be more suspicious of - it's the status quo and anaemic half-arsed reforms that more often feed into the pockets of the powerful while giving a veneer of progress.
Just look around this very thread, you may be surprised.
The main problem, I believe, is that most of the people really don't like the idea of being ordered to be even minorly inconvenienced even for their own supposed benefit, much less for benefit of the others.
I've known several smokers, and they all complained how the laws keep getting stricter on where you can legally smoke, and that the tobacco prices keep going up, and that people keep asking them to not smoke near them, etc. And every time I asked "why don't you just give it up then?", oh boy, the replies I got and their tone... let me just say I've never asked that question again to the same person because I feel that'd actually turn me into their enemies.
By the way, I've heard economical arguments against soft-banning smoking: after all, tobacco companies are a part of the economy, and if they'd go out of business, the economy will suffer. A lot. And I heard the arguments from the personal freedom. And the "there are bigger issues" kind of arguments too -- funnily enough, the most common example of a "bigger issue" is road traffic crashes.
A relative of mine was told by their trusted doctor that they have to quit smoking, or else it would kill him.
My relative expressed the idea that he'd rather lose a day of his life (possibly longer) for each cigarette he smoked than have to give it up.
He was addicted. He couldn't kick the habit. And I have never smoked a thing because of that, either out of fear for me getting addicted myself, or just as a lesson learned that it's a lot easier to avoid the addiction than fight it once it's latched onto you.
I wouldn't use the word "violated" but yes, seat belt law decreased the total amount of freedom. If you don't agree to that it means we don't use the same definition of the word "freedom" or the word "law".
Because of that law I am either less free on the seat of my car, or (if I ignore that and I am caught and fined) I am less free about how to to spend my own X dollars (the fine).
I think by rejecting the word "violated" you've materially changed the question, from a one about politics to one about semantics. There are many possible definitions of freedom and high among them is "the ability to do whatever you want". In this sense such laws obviously reduce freedom - as you state, it's a simple matter of definition.
But that's an uninteresting matter of word definitions. The question about "violating" your freedom is about your judgement as to whether it is a good or a bad thing for the law to restrict you in this way. You haven't said anything about that.
Also - and this applies to vaccines too - this definition of "freedom" is an academic one. There should be a competing measure of valuable freedom, defined as how much your freedom helps you to take advantage of the benefits of the world.
We then need to work out why so many people are so fiercely wedded to their Zero-value Freedoms...
Since you write about freedom being rebalanced, it means you recognize it can be increased in one aspect or decreased in another aspect. (However increase never happened in neither of the two parallel universes, only this or that decrease; so the term "rebalancing" doesn't really fit.)
I'm not arguing in favor or against seat belts or constraining any other freedom. I can't help observing it happens.
The context I'm presuming is that governments have to step in when deaths increase, to mandate certain responsibilities that individuals or corporations might otherwise seek to avoid.
So in an increasingly vehicle-centric world, the number of deaths puts a weight on one side of the scales, and we have a number of branches on the other side of the scales. On one branch, we could change the speed limits; on another branch, we could introduce car safety devices; in other branches we could limit the number of cars on the road or increase car death punishments or embed random nails in all the roads to turn them into obstacle courses. Any of these could reduce the number of deaths and rebalance the freedom side.
I'm not saying that freedom necessarily has a balance within itself, but is always balanced against responsibilities. A country without any responsibilities could exist, but probably not for very long. We could set a cap on responsibilities and allow almost-infinite freedoms, but as technology improves and society complexifies, I believe that would have the same end result.
So all that is to say I guess I am in favour of constraining freedoms, proportionate to the new freedoms that naturally come into being. If personal light aircraft become cheap and readily available, such that more in-air collisions occur, I would expect and support the government in restricting the freedoms of where light aircraft can fly and the training required to operate them. If small blocks of uranium started falling from the sky, I would expect and support the government in restricting the freedoms of what people could do with these chunks of uranium far more drastically.
Sometimes - rarely - responsibilities rise on their own. In the current pandemic, it is appropriate for the government to promote and in some cases mandate small impediments to our freedoms. Hopefully these will be short-term, and it is up to us to ensure that the government doesn't use these dark days as an excuse to curtail people's freedoms indefinitely.
Because with all this said, I'm totally against unnecessary forms of tracking, biometric surveillance and other use of new technology to remove freedoms we historically have, especially when the government uses deceptive moral arguments to justify them or paves the way for future immoral regimes.
I definitely don't see face masks or seat belts falling anywhere near that category though.
For COVID it's the confidence in one's immune system,
for seatbelts it's confidence in one's driving abilities,
for drugs such as alcohol and other drugs...it's the confidence in one's abilities to handle it.
Not saying government is wrong but it's natural that there will be a pushback from people who want to live and go out and about in the world without fear and with their chin up.
Because according to their perspective the government is first insinuating that they are weak and secondly stepping on their freedom to again go out and about in the world without any fears.
I see this line a lot and it's entirely nonsensical. I don't wear a seatbelt out of fear, I wear a seatbelt as a rational choice to reduce risk of injury in random accidents.
It might be nonsensical for you, but for the sort of people we are discussing they ditch the seatbelt and if they ever have any thought about reducing the risk of random accidents they try and doing it with Horsepower and braking capabilities, which are the things which come as an added bonus to the type of cars they enjoy driving such as Muscle cars, Lambos, 'Vettes etc.
It's a very big world out there, if you have a variety of interests you'll find that this sort of people are amazing to be around while doing some activities in which the typical rationalists and left-brain people would be such a drag.
I don't see how that's actually a counterargument to my statement.
> while doing some activities in which the typical rationalists and left-brain people would be such a drag
What, are you trying to argue now that people who wear seatbelts are boring? This sounds like the "bad guy" in some 90s car safety education video for kids.
It is. The burden of the proof is always on the person or the organization that cares about something deeply enough that wants to perpetuate such behavior. E.g. Vaccines or seatbelts or reduction in sugary drinks or whatever.
The failure to do so is theirs not the people whose behavior they are trying to change because they are fine with the present day status of handling things.
If you fail, you only have yourself to blame. You don't get to say "Ugh. their bahavior is nonsensical!"
> What, are you trying to argue now that people who wear seatbelts are boring?
Well...yeah? If you wear a seatbelt while driving in the city chances are that once we get to the club you won't drink, which also means you won't lose inhibitions, which also means that you won't pay for drinks, which also means that you won't find female companionship for the night.
I mean it's not some new discovery. People who play it safe are boring.
Nature can't be fooled, there is no substitute for taking risks and having things going your way, that's the best outcome among the many possible outcomes and that's why we refer to those people as "cool" , "charismatic" or "projecting an aura"
Now I've seen it all.
The benefits of both seatbelts and vaccines, not just to a single person but to everyone else around them, are proven and well-documented.
You're also still avoiding the initial point, which is that it's nonsensical to claim that people only wear seatbelts out of fear.
> Well...yeah? If you wear a seatbelt while driving in the city chances are that once we get to the club you won't drink, which also means you won't lose inhibitions, which also means that you won't pay for drinks, which also means that you won't find female companionship for the night.
I'm sure since you're talking about burden of proof you have some data to back this up, right?
Well that's the physics and the immunology part of the science.
You still got to do the social science. If you fail that then all the progress done in the lab is moot.
The burden of the proof is there even more strongly for the social science. If the organization fails to obtain the desired behavior when the lab work proves that such behavior provides an advantage then that is an even worse failure from the organization. They should look at what they did wrong with their communication.
It is confidence in the driver's abilities. If you are a passenger you may feel under pressure not to question the drivers abilities by putting on a seatbelt.
And it is also confidence in the abilities of other drivers on the road.
I'm reminded of that old standby: "Anyone who drives slower than me is an idiot, and anyone who drives faster than me is an asshole." Even the best driver in the world should plan for all the idiots and assholes out there.
This could have gone very differently. Once again, ancient Hebrew law comes through:
"If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death... But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned and its owner also is to be put to death"
This is pretty directly applicable. Cars are dangerous. If car makers fail to improve their safety, they're liable to being sued by consumers. Seatbelts fit the bill, as do airbags. In a free market, it's in the interest of the manufacturers to take care of their customers. Customers can be as dumb as they want.
I guess my question though, is why didn't it work out this way?
In theory, maybe. But the government's main business in practice seems to be the continuation of its (government's) existence, and having somewhat healthy population, and having population at all, for that matter, really helps -- especially if the measures intended to improve the public health/safety don't really cost the government much if anything.
> In a free market, it's in the interest of the manufacturers to take care of their customers
[Citation needed]. Anyway, the car market is not free: every car manufacturer has non-infinitesimal market share, and that opens the possibility of all kinds of interesting market manipulations.
The market-based process of product optimization you have outlined has many holes -- in this case, market failures including cartel behavior and incomplete information.
The thing that's surprising is that despite the many flaws of the pure laissez-faire approach, seen repeatedly, people trot it out as if it's still fresh, in wonderment that it hasn't been tried hard enough.
We live in a society, and there are some amount of beliefs shared by large groups within that society(In this case, "wearing a seatbelt isn't a personal choice, because not wearing one and getting into an accident taxes resources from others and therefor extends beyond "I should get to do whatever I want"). The second you put a formal sate into place, you're giving up freedom in exchange for codification of social beliefs.
The problem is that not everyone agrees on these social beliefs. Pick literally any topic, and someone says "no, that's wrong". So no matter what laws you make, someone always disagrees with them. You now need ways to enforce those beliefs, and penalties are easier than rewards (because you need a way to fund/create rewards and that requires more resources than a penalty which often involves taking resources from those involved).
The point is, without enforcement there will always be a group that doesn't do the thing everyone else wants.
(Side note: your hebrew law example is pointedly NOT how US tort law works, and I think a lot of people are thankful for that. We all know bulls, even those without a history of goring, CAN gore someone to death, and if you don't do everything in your power to prevent that, you're liable.)
> "If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death... But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned and its owner also is to be put to death"
Seems to me a person who catches the virus and spreads it thereby killing others is analogous to the bull owner who lets their known violent bull kill others". Unless you're saying anti-vaxers don't believe the virus kills anyone period? It seems like the parable is saying "you are responsible for how you and your actions affect others unless you can say you didn't know any better but once you do know better you're responsible"