Traffic safety holy grail: Zero deaths

Yes, seriously. Someone started a thread on here. They forgot to check with the czar censorship committee for acceptable thread topics.

It's a bit interesting.

More than half the U.S. states only require seat belts of front seat passengers. Using your "please" rationale , shouldn't the requirement be the other way around -- required for back seat passengers, but not front seat passengers?

If it's about someone crashing through your seat and killing you (we don't make our car seats out of tissue paper, but maybe things are different where you are), rationally, by making the person in the front seat into an immovable target, I would guess you are putting him or her more at risk, the way you have reasoned this all out.

 

1) I don't know. I haven't really looked that closely at his methodology. I just had seen his name come up in the past on this and I fished that out. What I do know is that when people say "It's common sense," or they link to traffic statistics and make correlation implies causation conclusions, the way for example TigerVols did in a post, it very often ignores any number of other factors that may have contributed to a statistical outcome. That is actually usually the case. I also know that if you force behaviors on people to regulate perceived risk, there is a good chance you are going to change the amount of risk they are willing to take. Adams is suggesting that has been the result of seat belt laws, based on statistical analysis.

2) People here are hung up on the words "victimless crime." It's not a term I made up. It is what people use to distinguish between things we criminalize because they cause a direct harm to someone else (i.e. -- you are free to live your life, until you start stepping on my toes) and things we criminalize for other reasons. For example, people will often say that drugs or prostitution are victimless crimes -- things we have criminalized without there being a "Joe robbed (or physically hurt, etc.) Fred rationale for them being illegalized. They say the same thing about seat belt laws. Taking the steps you did beyond the social contract -- the 40 years on a ventilator at public expense -- rationale for regulating behaviors, you can allow your government to arbitrarily regulate everything and anything with a claim of societal benefit. I can't think of a place that doesn't potentially end, with nearly every aspect of our lives being subject to rule by someone.

In the grand scheme of things, yes, people are right. ... This is a relatively minor infringement on people's lives. But it's still worth thinking about why we drive up costs for people by dictating behaviors like this, whether the behavior we dictate really even has the effect people assume is "common sense," and the door we've opened allowing our government to regulate our lives in ways that get away from the primacy on individual rights -- and distrust of being ruled over -- that was sort of central to maintaining a democratic republic.

My posts have just pointed those things out. Somehow -- even though I didn't respond -- right off the bat, I was being quoted on here and responded to as if I suggested that people shouldn't wear seat belts.