Posted on September 26th 1986
Seatbelt Laws Restrain Freedom
By Alex Linder
[ The following is from a forum thread posting. ]
[opinion published in Pomona College's The Student Life, Friday, September 26, 1986]
Seatbelt Laws Restrain Freedom
By Alex Linder
Over the past two or three years, several states, California included, have passed laws mandating the use of seatbelts. It is my belief that these laws and other similarly inspired laws (henceforth referred to as "seatbelt laws") represent an unwarranted accretion of governmental power through legislative usurpation of certain decision-making powers properly reserved for the individual.
Let me preface philosophical justification of my opposition to "seatbelt laws" by saying that I wear seatbelts and believe that everyone else should too, as facts and figures clearly show that seatbelts do indeed save lives. Like the trooper says, he's never unbuckled a dead person!
Still, it's a long jump from the fact that a certain action is beneficial to the conclusion that said action must be legally mandatory. Thus, as a conservative, a voluntarist, and a good American, I resent such governmental coercion. "Seatbelt laws" fall into the general category of laws regulating an individual's behavior with regard to himself. In keeping with solid libertarian principles, I believe the government has no business restricting an individual from performing (or not performing) any act, the result(s) of which directly affect that individual alone. Rather, it is the duty and proper function of the government to regulate those actions of an individual affecting others besides himself; to prevent one individual from coercing another, as Goldwater would say.
Turning now from the philosophical, let us examine the seatbelt law itself in detail. What were the motivations of the framers? As far as I can tell, the framers essentially wanted to protect the stupid from themselves (more on this later), but masked this goal by appealing to what they consider the high social cost of allowing people to ride unrestrained. The framers' case essentially rests on their judgment that the social cost (measured in dollars paid out by tax-supported programs such as Medicare) engendered by maimed crash victims and the progeny of the human roadkill outweighs the loss of individual freedom not to wear a seatbelt. Not a bad argument, but the numbers just aren't there. At most, the seatbelt law keeps a few thousand people from government support. And Lord knows, with the vast multitude presently sucking off the public teat, what difference a few more?
If those responsible for the law were truly serious about reducing high social costs relating to traffic accidents, more reasonable they should attempt to reimpose Prohibition, since alcohol-related social costs are far higher than costs related to unrestrained passengers. Now obviously another Prohibition is politically out of the question, and although some might say that inabilty to solve larger problems legitimates the abandonment of attempts to solve smaller problems, there are better arguments to be made against the seatbelt law. The thin-end-of-the-wedge argument comes to mind. Who will deny that, ridiculous as it may seem today, some future legislator might conceivably attempt to justify, using the precedent set by the seatbelt law, a ban on the consumption of, say, red meat, arguing that the social cost resulting from an excessive number of stroke and heart attack victims (whose medical problems developed primarily from over-consumption of cholesterol) is simply too high to allow citizens to continue their perverse dietary habits?
But it is my contention that the loss of even so minor a freedom as the right to go beltless cannot properly be justified by appeal to the exigencies of social cost. Totalitarian societies are characterized by their sacrifice of individual liberty at the altar of state interest whereas we in America, conversely, believe that the state exists only to serve the interests of its individual citizens. All of which is not to imply that "seatbelt laws" will lead to the socialization of the U.S., merely to point out that they are not consistent with the goals of the preservation and extension of individual freedom to which we should expect our lawmakers to aspire.
And finally, I arrive at the thesis of my editorial: The seatbelt law and "seatbelt laws" in general represent a sort of nationwide chipping away at the foundation of the precepts central to the time-honored, thoroughly American concept of personal responsibility. We Americans have traditionally been noted for our rugged individualism upheld by principles embodied in, for example, the Bill of Rights. America was, and mostly still is, a place where the individual succeeds or fails on his own merits, without the government getting in his way on either the way up or the way down. But when I consider not only the seatbelt law but proposed laws making bartenders responsible for accidents caused by drunken patrons on their way home and laws limiting interest rates chargeable by credit card companies (due to their card owners' inability to manage their money) it's enough to make me believe that the egalitarians have finally gained control and reified their concept of life as something less than a full-contact sport. It is wrong to legally protect people from their own stupidity because it denies them their right to screw up, which is also their right to succeed. If we continue to base our laws on the assumption that the average man doesn't know where his true interests lie, and that the government must run his life for "his own good," then we will destroy the foundation on which our Republic rests, in which case we might as well fold it up right now and find ourselves a good king.//