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.