Law vs Freedom

Same goes for eating, checking on a child in the backseat, or being pestered by an older child in any seat. I didn't see that Mythbusters episode but over here some advisors tell us that using a cellphone while driving is equivalent to .08, the draconian new redefinition of DUI. (It used to be .10.)

The reason given is the typical one for almost any activity: people who are drunk are at least trying to drive. People who are eating, arguing with children, having a really important conversation on the phone, etc., don't even think about what they're doing for long periods of time.

 

Every individual must have the right to perform his own risk analysis and management. No one else can decide for him whether the benefit of relief, pleasure, inspiration, etc., derived from an action or decision is or is not worth the cost in money, health, social standing, etc. The reason is that no one else is capable of measuring the benefit, and also because they probably can't measure the cost to a level of accuracy that would be required in any other calculation. This weak ability is weakened even further by the actuarial aspect: No one can judge for anyone else whether, for example, experiencing one day of happiness today is worth the risk of experiencing one month of misery fifty years in the future if the subject even lives that long.

This is the underlying fallacy of the Nanny State. Each one of us, as imperfect as he is, is the only person who has even the slightest rational ability to make such decisions for himself.

Obviously when other people are affected this must be taken into account. Driving 100mph on a residential street endangers the lives of others so it is reasonable to outlaw this behavior, no matter how much fun it might be. But the health risk from drinking an oversize cup of soda accrues entirely to the drinker. The automatic retort from the Nanny Left is that if you are hospitalized for the effects of a lifetime of soda drinking, and you have no medical insurance, the public treasury will have to pay your bills and that affects every taxpayer.

Indeed. This in a nutshell illustrates why I am a libertarian. If you spend your life drinking oversize sodas, and you don't buy medical insurance, you should be allowed to die in your easy chair. That risk should be yours, not mine.

If everyone were allowed to experience the consequences of their own risk analysis and management, instead of Big Nanny stepping in to save them from themselves, perhaps they would become wiser risk analysts.

 

You're preaching to the libertarian choir, young man. The second-order effects of drug prohibition are far more pernicious to society and its members than the drugs themselves. My parents grew up in Chicago during Prohibition and they saw first hand what happens when an out-of-control government decides to shift a popular commodity to the black market.

• Marketing the commodity becomes a high-risk occupation so only people who are comfortable taking high risks are willing to engage in it: criminals.
• Risk is a factor in pricing decisions, as is limited supply, so prices skyrocket. The Law of Supply and Demand predicts this, but governments believe they are exempt from all laws except their own.
• Without government oversight, and with production forced (often literally) underground, quality control deteriorates or disappears. During Prohibition many people were blinded or killed by wood alcohol in their liquor; during the New Prohibition many people are similary killed by impurities, or simply by overdoses due to inaccurate formulation.
• Without recourse to the legal system to resolve disputes, rival dealers and unhappy customers resort to shooting each other in the street, often catching bystanders in the crossfire. There were entire neighborhoods in Chicago where my parents refused to travel, and today in Mexico (where today's U.S. government has cleverly offloaded the current drug war because nobody in our country cares about dead Mexicans) there are vast regions where it's not safe to travel. The new wave of immigration from Mexico is rich people driving across the border in their BMWs with all the correct paperwork, buying mansions in San Antonio and running their businesses from there.
• Since children are difficult to capture and prosecute, they are recruited as runners, introducing them to a life that is much more exciting than going to school--and pays better.
• These same children compare the lives of their hard-working parents to the limousines and bling of the gangsters, and decide which life they want for themselves.
• In American society, which does not revere authority the way European and Japanese people do, doing something illegal is merely naughty, and doing something naughty is cool. My mother lamented that the worst thing about Prohibition is that it motivated women to start going to taverns ("speakeasies"). In addition, things that are naughty and cool appeal to children.
• The enormous sums of money passing through a black market are an irresistible temptation to many hard-working and basically honest police officers, district attorneys, judges, prison guards, and other public servants. Corruption during the Depression was so bad that no one even tried to deny it. As one journalist put it, "Prohibition is a miracle because it satifies everyone: the people who don't like liquor because the law was passed, and the people who do like it because it is not enforced." Life magazine actually ran a spread on taverns in New York City. The cliche was, "It's really hard to get a drink in New York. You have to shout over the crowd and get a busy waiter's attention."
• Ultimately the effect of passing a law that conflicts with the citizens' own view of morality is to undermine respect for government. During the 1920s the U.S. government was a laughingstock. When FDR took office in 1933 he turned that around by doing two things: starting up the New Deal to end the Depression, and repealing Prohibition to bring respect back to government. Oh yeah, and in an era when income tax was not at its current confiscatory level, the tax on alcohol increased federal revenue by about 30%!

Bottom line: You can't legislate morality. The more powerful a government becomes, the more harm it causes.

 

I have often hypothesized that the problem with a cellphone (hand-held or hands-free) is that it completely dominates one ear, leaving the other as the only source of environmental sound. Remembering that our forebrain is quite neatly divided into two hemispheres, I suggest that this might result in each of the two focusing entirely on its own environment and losing touch with the other's. So if one hemisphere is alarmed by a weeping babysitter while the other one hears an auto horn (from a direction it can't identify because it has lost the ability for stereophonic placement), it might take the two hemispheres a fourth of a second to decide who gets to be in charge. At freeway speed your car travels more than one car-length in a quarter of a second! This could make the difference between screeching to a halt and crashing into the next car.

My evidence to support this hypothesis is the 1970s, when almost every driver on the road had a CB radio. Talking on a CB wasn't just a matter of "hand-held," it was downright awkward! The microphone was connected to the dashboard by a spiral cable. Yet I never heard of an accident caused by using a CB while driving. Why? Because the sound came through a loudspeaker in the dashboard, just like the radio! It didn't block the sounds going into either ear, so you could still hear the traffic and the emergency vehicles just fine, in stereo so you knew where they were.

Most car stereos already have a jack for plugging in external sound sources like iPods. All we need is for cellphones to sprout output cables like iPods that can be plugged into those jacks. Then we can hear the sound through the stereo speakers and still hear the real world outside.

I guarantee that the cellphone accident rate will drop to almost zero.

As for other distractions, a comedian once said something that I thought was pretty astute:

People who eat while they're driving are much more dangerous than drunks. Drunks are at least trying to drive. People who are eating just want the sugar!​

Oh don't get me started on that Big Nanny lunacy! The reason we're now required to put children in the back seat is that every year something like forty children were killed by air bags in the front seat. But now, something like seventy children are killed every year by heat stroke, from being forgotten in the back seat. The shit-for-brains government actually made it worse!

Yes of course, we're all perfect parents (well not me, I don't have kids) who would never in a million years forget that our precious baby is in the back seat. Yet it happens to some American seventy times every year. The usual scenario is that the spouse calls with an emergency--my check to the caterer bounced so they won't bring the food to the graduation party tonight unless you go over there right now and give them your Visa card. So you end up coming to work at a different time, from a different direction, maybe even parking in a different lot. All of your daily habits are overridden. You've got no cues to remind yourself of the back seat passenger that you completely forgot to drop off at day care because you didn't even drive down the street where the day care center is located.

Some guy invented a really cool device that attaches to the bottom of the back seat and can tell that something with the exact weight of a baby in a baby seat is there. If you turn off the engine and close the doors, it will make siren noises at you. No way could you forget little Oscar in the backseat with one of those things.

And ya know what? He couldn't sell the patent to any manufacturer. They did lots of market research and discovered that nobody would buy the thing. Nobody can admit to themselves that they might be confused enough to leave their precious baby in the car. So they don't need a warning siren.

This is something that Big Nanny will have to legislate and force the manufacturers to include in the standard equipment.

** The libertarian sighs dejectedly. **