I know I haven't posted in forever. I also know that this post is more serious than my normal satire. However, I have become increasingly interested in the shifts and shades of the great babysitter that is our "government." Today's subject: cell phones on the road.Let me preface this by saying I hate it when people drive while talking on a cell phone. I very rarely do it because I acknowledge that I am a less-effective driver while I am on the phone.
Our city-council recently passed a law that you can not talk on a cell phone without a hands-free system while driving. Many people have fought against this and it appears that there may be enough petitions to get it on a public ballot. I applaud these folks for fighting this but I think this is a symptom of deeper problems that most people are not willing to fight for.
I oppose it for a specific reason: it is a law based on probability. Some group came up with statistics that say if you talk on your cell phone while driving you are X% more likely to get in a car accident. I neither dispute nor condone the results of the study itself. I dispute the right of our government to make any law based on probability, the cell phone is just the more recent example.
One hot topic lately is racial profiling. Many people dispute racial profiling. "How can our government say that, just because I am [insert race here], I am more likely to be a [terrorist/murderer/etc]?"
The facts don't lie: certain demographics are more likely to commit certain acts of crime. Should we be preemptive and arrest/search/harass those people because of their biological characteristics? Most [intelligent] people would say no.
So why are probabilities okay with a cell phone? Only because biology (race, gender, etc) is not involved? When did our government get into the business of punishing a probability and not actual crime that infringes on the rights of others?
Newsflash: there's nothing new happening here. Do you know what the most popular probability crime is? If you guessed DUI you are the winner.
I know this is where I'm going to lose most people because many of us know someone who would be alive today if it weren't for a drunk driver. But this is exactly how the government gained the power in the first place - they preyed on the fears of the public: If we allow drunk people to drive, people will die. We know this and so we allow ourselves to be pulled over and subjected to the humiliation of street tests, breathalyzers and other testing to prove that we are low risk. But what about other high-probability risks? What about the elderly, hearing-impaired, sleepy, sore, angry, etc? Many of these conditions are at least as dangerous as having a BAC greater than .08.
I'm not saying that drunk driving is intelligent, safe or morally okay. What I am saying is that government (if it has any power at all) should only have the power to punish actions that infringe upon the freedoms and rights of others.
This is an argument of principal. It applies to everything from driving laws to gun laws. America needs punishments for crimes that infringe on the rights of the public. America needs personal accountability. America does not need to be taxed heavily for a nanny service.
Whether you agree with me or not, I urge you to think about the laws you live under. Every law passed has overhead, an increase in cost for enforcement, court cases and potentially imprisonment. When you vote, remember that every law passed is another dime to the babysitter.
EDIT: Comments welcome...curious about your thoughts.
You make a strong argument, and I half way agree with you. The trickiness comes in that gray area of defining what is actually an infringement of our rights and freedoms. Being black, or elderly, or sick is a characteristic, not an action. While DUI or distracted driving of any kind is generally an *action* that the individual had a choice in performing or not. You can't choose not to be middle eastern, so you shouldn't be profiled on it regardless of probability, but you can choose to not use a cell phone while driving.
ReplyDeleteI'm unsure where I sit as to the cell phone thing. I think it might be possible to make an equally validd argument that the action is indeed an infringement of citizens' rights to walk safely outdoors without having a distracted driver mounting the curb and hitting them. But I do see your point about the probability matter.
On the other aspect of your post of government as babysitter... well, of course it is. That's what it was created for and that's why we're not a true democracy but a republic instead. Any nation of this size needs a babysitter and duly designates one - luckily for us through a system of mostly fair voting rather than by military coup.
It's very easy to see the government as some wasteful entity stealing away a quarter of every dollar we make and putting up too many signs to tell us what grass not to walk on, but ultimately you do have to balance that viewpoint out a bit by remembering that the government and the tax dollars we send to it also give us the very country we're so proud of - a military that keeps us free, hospitals that keep us alive, police, fire and ambulance services that keep us safe, arts institutions and national parks that keep us entertained, prisons that keep the undesirables from the general populace, a system of roads and transport infrastructure that lets us go places, schools to teach our kids... you get the drift, so I won't go on. The point is, yes, the government is an expensive entity, prone to mistakes and redundancy and overspending... but I'm happier having a babysitter than being left "home alone" in a lawless, defenseless, uneducated country. :-)