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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> People dying in auto accidents costs the government money in lost economic activity as well as things like medical care.

I'm astounded to read this. Do you believe we are the property of the government? That we live for the benefit of the government? That we are kept alive to serve the government?

> I have a really hard time seeing how a helmet law, which if violated would result in what, a citation?, can be construed as overwhelmingly oppressive. This is pretty weak.

Washington State just repealed the bicycle helmet law, on the grounds that it was racist.

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In this sense we are the government. The people that are getting hurt in auto accidents are us, and in a large number of cases not just the person behind the wheel of bad driving.

If you crash into someone and you die but they dont, they are still left as a burden on society to take care of.

> In this sense we are the government.

I'm not your property, either.

But your medical care increases my burden.

Washing your brain off the road becomes someone else's emotional burden.

Voting for taxes doesn't imply you now own the people who benefit from those taxes.

I’m not sure the right people feel the same way about this. I recall that after the 2008ish bailouts many politicians felt they were entitled to own banks, even the ones who did not ask for and had repaid the money.

Seeing as there's no chance of voting for "no taxes" because that's not how effective governments in the real world work (although I wish the Seasteaders, Cryptoland[0], and the LPD[1] the best of luck), your point is rather moot.

A quick synopsis of my wall of words below - stop calling mutual obligation "ownership", I feel that's a bit of a silly framing.

No matter how high or low our tax rates, you live in a society. Societies were evolved by our ancestors because they kept clever apes (with no natural weapons and infants that have the animal world's longest periods of helplessness due to the compromises involved in big brains and pelvises) alive better than not having them.

But a society comes with a) rights and b) responsibilities. The two are not an OR, nor XOR, but very much AND.

The government mandating you wear a helmet on a motorcycle is because far too many people focus on their rights only, and consider their responsibilities an onerous imposition - and then impose the consequences of their choices on the rest of society.

If you feel you have no obligations to the rest of society, you're wrong in my opinion, but you are always free, of course, to opt out entirely, go and build a hut in the boreal forests (tropical is also an option, but might be too many societies living in them for your tastes), and live fully free.

And because Terry Pratchett is eminently quotable in these areas: "Freedom may be mankind's natural state, but so is sitting in a tree eating your dinner while it is still wriggling."

Perhaps I can give you an example not involving brains being hosed off roadways.

As our society is a big fan of property rights, a mutual obligation of "don't steal my stuff, and I won't steal yours" is core to it. Even the USSR, despite it's views on private property, weren't fans of stealing from other members of your society.

It's a very old value in human societies, I mean, it's in the top ten Commandments from YHWH, and we're going back a few thousand years there.

Previously it was enforced by people of the tribe throwing stones while the priests watched, these days it's enforced by the government, a collective figment we formed to represent our society's collective desires and values as best we can (very imperfectly, but as the old saying goes, democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others we've tried).

If I choose to steal your stuff, agents of the government (paid for by the taxes of yourself and other members of society) will try to apprehend me, return your stuff, and punish me for violating a mutual obligation inherent to our society.

But, to go full reductio ad absurdum here, why should the fact of your paying taxes constrain my choice to steal your stuff? Why should my choices be constrained when they impact you? Do you think you own me?

If not, please send me location details, times of day you're not at home, alarm codes, the favourite foods of any pets which might be defensive when I come calling unexpectedly so I can make friends before trying to carry your TV out, and which valuables have the highest market value, just so I can reaffirm that you and I claim no ownership of each other or our respective actions.

TL;DR - it's not ownership, it's mutual obligation. It's central to being a social animal, and we're social animals because that's how we evolved.

PS - I was trying to be understanding of your POV, as I had assumed you'd lived in the USSR based on your repeated comparisons to it. Then I found out that you're Apple Pie American, so now I'm just a bit sad that you're resorting to Soviet Russia for the sake of argument.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/16/cryptolan...

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

Societies that we actually have today did not evolve around "mutual obligations". They evolved as a tool of control of production by the elites, to enable exploitation of laborers. You may argue that social democracies are different, but they retain the hierarchical power structures from those older times. So even in a democracy, to conflate a government policy with social obligation is misleading at best.

Citation needed on that one :) How do you think elites took control, other than through mutual obligation?

E.g., if you farmers grow the grain and give us some, us warriors will protect you from the other tribe who would burn your homes, enslave your children, and steal your food. Or, us priests will resolve your disputes according to our tribe's values, and intercede with the gods to ensure the rains come.

Originally, mostly by direct violence or threat thereof. The thing about extracting profits from other people is that you can invest them into more warriors, which can be used to subjugate and then control more people to extract profits from them etc. That's how most modern countries originated.

On the violence imposed by nobility, I agree, the threat of violence, indeed, claiming the sole right to use violence, has been inherent to, well, being a noble, or being a government.

That said, the nobility weren't monolithic, so Lord X being an asshole could find himself replaced, with the people's blessing, by Lord Y.

Or, as seems to have happened several times in ancient history, people walked away from a complex society they found uncompelling. Societies splintered, sometimes just people gave up on it altogether and reverted to older patterns of life that involved less warring princes throwing your children into cenotes.

And likewise, there was a limit to how much violence you could use sustainably - killing all your farmers was a bad move.

Obviously, the people holding the monopoly on power gradually developed ideas to prevent this mobility, serfdom was a favourite during feudalism.

But, mutual obligation still existed between commoner and noble. A noble who didn't defend his peasants when they were attacked was violating an ancient contract. Likewise, it wasn't commoners that were thrice-killed in PIE derived cultures - when you really needed to get the attention of the gods, you had to send someone of noble birth.

And lastly, there were a bunch of peasant revolts. A few of them even succeeded. (Far too few, IMO, but bless them for trying). And they generally arose when the commoners felt that the nobles hadn't held up their end of the bargain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts

It's a very complicated thing to try to generalise over, but am I seriously wrong to state that from tribal society upwards, that everyone in that society is expected to fulfill their obligations to others in that society?

That was pretty much my main thesis :)

Interesting side tangent on this - in areas where different societies (typically, but not always) sharing a culture fiercely fought each other, the concept of hospitality-as-an-unbreakable-law often developed.

While it imposed mutual obligation on host and guest, it was also a mutual obligation between the societies - why would I extend hospitality to people from tribe X, if they never extend it to us?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality#Global_concepts

It's a very fascinating subject all round, and I think that trying to frame it all as exploiter and exploitee sacrifices a lot of nuance.

As for "that's how countries developed", I rather disagree. The concept of a nation is very new in human history. Germany and Italy as countries were, well, I guess the prototype for the joke that a nation is a language with a navy.

I don't have a problem with the notion of social obligations in general, in a society where there's actually a working mechanism by which these can be determined by consensus. But none of our existing societies are like that.

The elites are not monolithic, yes, and there's violence between them, too. But that violence is used to settle the question of who gets to exploit the rest of the population. Ditto wars.

Now, the elites did adopt the "mutual obligation" language (among others - "divine right", for example) to claim legitimacy. However, when one looks at the actual obligations involved, and especially at the history of them being fulfilled or ignored, and the consequences of ignoring them for either side, it's fairly obvious that the "contract" is very skewed and ultimately based on coercion.

The concept of a nation is different from the concept of a country, or a state. Nations are indeed relatively recent - unlike states. It's an artificial abstraction that allows the elites to channel popular discontent away from themselves and against "foreign enemies", which is why nationalism and populism go hand in hand so often. Whenever politicians start to talk about "national interests", it means that either someone is trying to rob them, or they're trying to rob their subjects.

Assuming for a second I would support your idea of "responsibilities", the question is where to draw the line.

If that line is drawn where you believe it is, any undue burden monetarily on society, then you would you agree you reject the concept of limited government and individual rights? If your position is taken to the logical conclusion, that because a person that is injured by not wearing a helmet posses an undue burden on society due to medical costs, there is literally no law or regulation that would be outside the bounds of government control. You are proposing a literal totalitarian regime.

For me I draw that line at a very different spot, you point to the idea that not stealing someone else's property has a social responsibility. I agree that people should not steal other peoples property, and that government should enforce said property rights. Theft is a direct harm, one individual harming another individual. That is clear delineation where government can be an arbitrator.

However the example here of a non-helmet wearer harming "society" at large is less direct, first not every person that does not where a helmet will get into an accident, then not every accident will result in medical care, then not every accident that results in medical care would go to the point to be an imposition on society. So now instead of a clear 1:1 direct harm you are now wanting government to use threat of violence (and to be clear all government laws are back by such a threat) to reduce a "harm" that is spread out over all of society, and is also a fraction of a fraction of percent probability that the burden will even present itself. To me that is unjustifiable and draconian, it does not rise to the level of requiring government intervention in the same way theft does.

Each of us has a natural right to defend their person, their liberty, and their property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. Society then has the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. We call this Government. The principle of collective right its reason for existing, its lawfulness is based on individual rights. As such the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force for the same reason cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

That is the foundation for which I look at government policy. So my question on this helmet issue is.. Can I as an individual impose my desire to another person to wear a helmet upon them forcibly? I can as an individual prevent them from stealing my property, but I do not believe I can forcibly make another person wear a helmet, since I can not do that as an individual, I do not believe the government should have that authority either.

No, but your choices impose a cost on me. And the rest of society. Society collectively saying "we're not going to put up with that particular set of costs generated by that particular choice" is not an assertion of "ownership", rather a collective agreement.

Externalities are an actual thing.

You don't need to be the government's property for the government to optimize laws in order to reduce loss of life and medical expenses (the latter is important because in practice if someone badly wounded shows up in the ER, they get treated and someone has to pay for it, and that might not be the injured person or an insurance company)

> You don't need to be

Yeah, you do. It goes hand in hand with being the property of the government. For an example, the Soviet Union believed that if they funded your education, you owe the government a lifetime of service for it.

Sure, in Soviet Russia they go hand in hand. But Soviet Russia is perhaps not the model to limit oneself to?

A government that does altruistic things for the benefit of the citizenry is good, actually.

I know the post you're responding to probably got a, "wait, that doesn't follow at all..." out of a bunch of folks, but I'd recommend letting it be to speak for itself—most everyone else can see the same thing you do. You're not going anywhere useful by engaging.

Doing altruistic things is one thing, going a step further and concluding that this entitles you to control the other is quite another.

I agree. But no one except you is suggesting that it does! No one except you has said anything about anyone being the governments property. You've invented a line of argument to be concerned about.

As another user said, your line of reasoning doesn't at all follow. I've tried to point that out twice now and I guess you don't want to acknowledge that.

> No one except you has said anything about anyone being the governments property

Read again the post I replied to.

> You don't need to be the government's property for the government to optimize

Right, so like I said. I mean you even quoted this part and then proceeded to not explain why perhaps you believe this is inevitable, but simply restate it. You're assuming you're correct but not justifying it.

Or perhaps you mean the prior comment where someone said "People dying in auto accidents costs the government money in lost economic activity as well as things like medical care." which you took umbrage with. But there's again, nothing that implies property here. I don't think that the businesses on my street are my property, but I can still support policies that benefit them, because a robust local economy still benefits me. Nor do I think I hold any sort of right of ownership over an average schoolchild, and yet I benefit from a well educated citizenry and so support robust public education.

Direct property ownership is not the only method by which people can benefit from things, and regulation is not necessarily done out of a sense of "entitlement". Some regulations are actually just good and improve the world.

> But there's again, nothing that implies property here.

Yes, there is. You're implying you're entitled to the work those people might do, and so you get to control their behavior. This is ownership.

So just to clarify here, does my boss or employer own me? Because he both is generally entitled to the work I do, and as such can control my behavior?

But more generally, I don't agree that exerting some amount of influence over behavior that affects me is ownership, as long as it is limited to the behavior that affects me. And as that user mentioned, there are costs society bears beyond the potential lost productivity (healthcare/rehabilitation costs as an example) so you can completely ignore this line of reasoning and their point still stands.

Employment is at-will on both sides. In the case of the state, you could also renounce your citizenship and try to get one with a more suitable country: so far as there's a wide range of choices and it's realistic to do that, you're not owned.

One of these cases is dramatically more realistic than the other.

Cost/benefit thinking has value. But realize you're taking one form of coercion (a state forcing others to pay for my medical costs whether or not I would choose to insure myself) to justify another (forbidding you to do something a bit risky to yourself). You might conclude the ownership is worth it, but it doesn't negate WalterBright's point. There's a cost in individual freedom.

I don't disagree with anything you've said! I take issue specifically with the idea that coercion implies ownership, which, well, it doesn't

Ownership is the power to coerce someone to do your bidding. It's not a piece of paper.

> Ownership is the power to coerce someone to do your bidding

I could maybe agree with this. But I find the gap between "helmet laws" and "you're forced to do the government's bidding" rather wide. Like as far as I can tell this reduces to "any reduction in rights is ownership", so the government limiting your right to murder people means that the government owns you already.

> so the government limiting your right to murder people means that the government owns you already.

You have no right to hurt other people. Having the government prevent you from murdering people is not owning you and is not infringing on your rights. Actually, the government should not be preventing you from murdering others - it is there to mete out justice if you do.

Meting out "justice" sounds like imposing government ownership.

Only if you can't see any difference between law and power.

Given that the argument being made here is that some laws formed by legitimate democratic institutions impose ownership (and are therefore unjust) no, you can't draw a distinction between laws and power here.

The Athenian assembly voted to massacre all the men on Melos, and sell the women and children into slavery. If you believe democracy is the source of all legitimacy, you need to debug your beliefs.

Edit: it's unclear whether that atrocity came to a vote, though it certainly happened. To pick a clear case of unjust and unlawful democratic legislation in the same war, there was the time they voted to execute six of eight generals, rather than subject each to a trial.

> Having the government prevent you from murdering people is not owning you and is not infringing on your rights.

Of course it is! You just don't believe my exercise of those rights is legitimate, but there's no intrinsically different about the act of shooting someone and the act of riding a bike without a helmet, from a Hobbesian point of view. You can argue that the government/society has a more legitimate interest in limiting exercise of one of those rights, and I'd agree. But when we're talking about what rights should be, you can't use a legal definition of rights. That's circular.

> Actually, the government should not be preventing you from murdering others - it is there to mete out justice if you do.

And see, this is I think an interesting argument. But it leads to a really perverse system. You can't engage in any form of harm reduction policy, which means the only lever you have to reduce criminal/harmful activity is to have really cruel punishments for the few directly harmful acts.

Like take speeding or drinking and driving as obvious examples. Under the "only mete justice if you harm others" approach, you can't criminalize drunk driving or speeding, only vehicular manslaughter, so you either live with more death due to dangerous driving, or you have to like make the punishment for drunk/dangerous driving so terrible that it dissuades people from even engaging in the risky behavior. But in practice, avoiding the circumstances that lead to harm is better for everyone (the victim, the potential perpetrator, society at large) than punishing people after the fact, and there are lots of situations where punishments simply don't work.

> does my boss or employer own me?

Nope. Because you and your boss work based on a voluntary freely consented agreement, not a forcible one. Slave contracts are illegal. You can quit anytime.

Taxation is not a free consent thing. I vote against lots of taxes, but they pass anyway and I'm forced to pay them. A vote is not consent and is not a contract.

> I don't agree that exerting some amount of influence over behavior that affects me is ownership

Forcibly controlling other people's behavior is ownership.

I wore seatbelts years before the law forced me to. I resent such laws in a free society, despite my seatbelt saving my life at one point. I will continue to wear a bike helmet even though I'm pleased the helmet law was repealed. I encourage you to wear one, too, but if you don't want to, it's your choice and your cranium.

Paradoxically it may be worthwhile for the government to forbid helmets in that case, because morgues cost less than hospitals.

Also, helmet laws reduce organs available for transplant. Instead of requiring helmets we should default all motorcycle riders in as organ donors. In fact I’d be in favor of changing the law to opt out rather than opt in.

Heh a law saying “no helmet = organ donor” would be fine by me.

The government arranges for most people to live in environments where driving or otherwise being around cars is necessary. Compensating controls are the least it can do.

Washington State just repealed the bicycle helmet law, on the grounds that it was racist.

This is insane. Literally insane.

I am not for or against a helmet law. But racist?!

I can see it being an economic issue, but that's not race. Absolutely not. There are poor people of all stripes.

They repealed the law because they wanted to for a bunch of fairly legitimate reasons. Due to the political climate at the time they couldn't say they did it because "what people do with their craniums is none of the government's business" so they picked a reason that they could use.

Yeah, they didn't repeal it because it was racist. They repealed it because the enforcement of it was biased. That's an important difference and omitting it can lead to misinterpretation.

As it turns out, their data showed that the vast majority of people already used helmets. Those who don't are mostly those who can't afford it, and fining them won't make cycling safer for anyone.

The bias in the enforcement was substantial: black cyclists got 4 times as many tickets as white, and nearly half of the tickets were issued to homeless people.

Missing in the bias statistics was the rate at which various groups wore helmets. Enforcement bias cannot be inferred without these figures, which were missing from every article I read about it.

It is blasphemous these days to even entertain the thought that there might be behavioural differences between races, so gathering these statistics is like picking the forbidden fruit.

Not only is it not blasphemous, GP literally entertained the thought and stated it as fact.

If you cannot afford a helmet, you are less likely to wear one, and if you get fined for not wearing on, it isn't going to incentivize you to buy one - it's going to render you less able to buy one.

Or perhaps you are suggesting that black people are poorer because their ancestors adaptations to sunlight light have altered the way they handle their finances or respond to those incentives?

In which case, you shouldn't feel like a blasphemer and should just expound on those theories here. Please, don't leave them unsaid because we are just going to have to assume what you think. And we might make the error of assuming that you are just a racist.

Yup, just as expected - four paragraphs accusing me of not being orthodox enough, finishing up with calling me a heretic.

Look up how black people go camping less, how they are better at sprinting than other races, etc.

Do you think a certain race simply not biking that much is so dangerous of a thought, it should be illegal to even think about it and should result in one being called epithets, as you just did?

Ridiculous.

I'm sorry but this appears to be unintelligible word salad? Are you replying to the right comment?

It may not even be that. If, for example, one group rides bikes more often than another group, they may be cited for lack of helmet use more even if the percentage of helmet use was exactly the same and the enforcement was perfectly unbiased.

What they're saying is that there are biases in the sample of the people who got fined. What you're asking is what caused that bias. While that's certainly an interesting question that should be answered for a variety of reasons, answering it is not necessary to conclude that the law isn't doing its intended job.

By this logic, we should immediately repeal all laws. All of them.

You don't repeal laws because someone feels the law is being applied unequally. You fix the problem which causes that inequal problem, thus, resolving the problem for all laws.

Anything else is just people using race to get rid of specific laws they don't like.

Sure, if we apply the same logic out of the context where it was applied in this case, then you're completely right.

However, context matters. The statistics they quoted showed that the helmet use was at 91% in Seattle.

So if you have a law that is punishing up to 9% of the population and you note some pretty ugly biases in the sample of those who get fined, then it doesn't sound unreasonable to conclude that maybe we don't need to be doing that right now.

What's the murder rate in Seattle? 0.0001%?

Do you really want to go down the rabbit hole of discussing just how many fallacies you stuffed in a one-liner? Is that what passes for discourse on HN nowadays?

The claim was, most people were obeying the law, so rather than fix the supposed problem (misuse of the law to target specific categories of people unfairly), just get rid of the law.

Murder has more people obeying that law, therefore, it should be looked at more eagerly with the same optics.

Looking at how only 91% of people are obeying a law, is an absurd and ridiculous method to determine if the law should exist.

You speak of logistical fallacies, but this entire premise is a fallacy.

Fix the problem, fix what leads to inequal application of the law. Removing this law, will not prevent every other law, even the charging of people of colour with murder, which happens excessively as well, when they are innocent.

Ridiculous!

> and nearly half of the tickets were issued to homeless people.

When I see people commit crime in Seattle, the perps are overwhelmingly homeless, so I can’t say I’m surprised.

Two origin theories that spring to mind are...

A) People of African/Melanesian/Aborigine heritage can have hair that is near impossible to wear a helmet with

B) Sikhs. I know in my country that they're exempt from motorcycle helmet laws provided they don't exceed 50km/h.

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