Are Seat Belt Laws a Good Idea?

I am sure you have all heard about how the Governor of my home state, the great state of New Jersey, was seriously injured in a car accident because he failed to buckle up. As expected, the incident has reinforced the support for the mandatory seatbelt laws that we have in NJ and in other states as well. Personally, I never go anywhere in the car without wearing my seatbelt, and I always insist that my passengers wear them as well. Quite frankly, it seems idiotic to NOT wear a seatbelt given the fact that there is no downside to wearing one. Anybody who doesn't wear a seatbelt ought to have their brain checked for extreme stupidity. Despite this, I firmly believe that most of these mandatory seatbelt laws should be eliminated.

The only seatbelt law that I am in favor of is one that mandates that children under the age of 18 must wear a seatbelt (or sit in a car seat or booster seat, as appropriate). As minors, parents have an extra obligation to protect them, since they are (in theory) unable to make choices for themselves. However, if an adult feels the need to not wear a seatbelt, who am I to stop them? Not wearing a seatbelt does not impact society as a whole. If somebody else isn't wearing a seatbelt, does it make me more likely to get into an accident? Well, maybe if I am dodging the flying body or something, but that is a danger that I don't lose any sleep over.

Part of living in a supposedly "free" society is that we are supposed to lean towards giving people the freedom to be an idiot, especially when a person's idiocy does not directly impact anyone else's freedom. We accept the fact that people might be idiots in exchange for the ability to live our lives the way that we please. Sure it can be messy when people don't make what society views as being the right choice, but that's the price that you pay for living here.

One might argue that not wearing a seatbelt DOES impact society through added medical costs, cost to support the orphans who are left behind, etc. However, I find that argument to be somewhat disturbing.

The first way I can approach that argument is to say that, if we are going to go down the path of accounting for the "costs" to society, then it is only fair to offset the costs with the "benefits" to society as well. Yes, it sounds morbid to think that the death of somebody has a "benefit" to society, but if you really want to be a real accountant, you have to be dispassionate about such things.

So what are the benefits, you might ask? Well, for one thing, now there is one less person that our society has to support through things like public assistance, Social Security, and the like. That is one less person who is wearing down our roads, and emitting greenhouse gases into the air. That is one less person we have to produce food for. And so on and so forth. I agree I am being insensitive here, but it only seems fair to point out the benefits if some politician is going to point out the costs.

The second way to approach the argument that there is a societal cost is to wonder if seat belt laws are going to send us down a "slippery slope" towards a more socialist society. On the one extreme you have anarchy, where the rights of the individual trump the rights of society. On the other extreme you have socialism, where the rights of society trump the rights of the individual. Our society in America is supposed to be somewhere in the middle, with some leanings away from the socialist side. In theory, we have a lot of latitude over how we live our lives, even if that means we live them in a way that might not be "optimal" from a societal standpoint. For instance, society might have a shortage of pharmacists, but the government isn't going to step in and tell John Doe on the street that he has to become a pharmacist instead of a lawyer, just because the country needs more pharmacists and fewer lawyers.

Laws mandating the use of seat belts tend to push our society towards the socialist end of the spectrum, where our individual rights are curtailed in favor of what is "perceived" as being best for society as a whole. Taken to the next level, I can see where our government might pass other behavioral laws using this same justification. Maybe they'll pass a law to tell us what we can eat or where we can go. Now we are starting to move away from being a "free" society and moving towards a centrally controlled society where the government dictates more and more of what we can and can't do.

You might say that I am being an alarmist. After all, seatbelt laws seem so harmless. However, it is not the law itself that I am against; it is the principle. The sad fact is that our legal system is based upon the concept of precedences - meaning that the past is used to justify the future. It is not far fetched for some politician to point to the seatbelt law as a justification for passing another law that restricts our freedoms in a slightly more intrusive way. And then that law is used to pass an even more intrusive law. And so it goes...