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Free Liberal: Coordinating towards higher values

Free Liberal

Coordinating towards higher values

The Click-it Tyranny

By Paul Jacob

A friend of mine went to traffic court to defend himself. Though the judge dismissed his ticket, he still came away fuming.

"You know, Paul," he told me, "we live under a petty tyranny."

Another case on the docket got his goat. A woman was nabbed just as she exited a bank drive-through. The cop had been waiting for her. You see, she hadn't immediately put her seatbelt back on.

She told the judge that she had taken it off to reach the buttons on the bank's outdoor machine. She insisted that she would have put the thing on when she noticed as she was driving down the road. The judge was unmoved.

Seat belts tend to save lives. But seat belt laws may not, as Ted Balaker argued recently in Reason magazine. New Hampshire, the only state to lack seat-belt laws, has the fourth safest highways in the nation. And, Balaker adds, "neither of the two safest states have primary enforcement" of the federal Click It program.

Lots of people support the tyranny of seat-belt laws because those who get in accidents without seat- belts are sometimes treated at the public expense. But no state takes this excuse seriously. A person with health care insurance or enough money in the bank isn't excused from the duty of wearing seat belts.

Further, as Balaker argues, a lot of people engage in much costlier behavior, such as overeating. And yet there are no spot checks at McDonald's or the local steak and spud house.

Oops. I hope I haven't given our petty tyrants any ideas.

This is Common Sense. I'm Paul Jacob.


Common Sense is published by Americans for Limited Government. Their website can be visited at www.limitedgov.org.



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