I could not find any Supreme Court rulings regarding seat belts but in my state we do not require helmets for motorcycle riders. I’m not sure how the rational basis test applies but there should be some codified methodology behind it and it should always defer to a person’s right to choose. We choose (individually) to risk our safety against probably outcome in everything we do. Some people choose to climb Mt Everest, which is a far deadlier risk than driving without a seatbelt. I personally would never drive without a restraint system but that’s my choice. The government should use the rational basis test for mandated safety devices and not how people choose to use them. Insurance companies are free to adjust their rates according to how people elect to behave just as they do with cigarettes and other life choices.
Your logic is misplaced. Losing the right to drive is a criminal function based on the danger you pose to other people.
So being 90 and unable to see makes one a criminal now?
No, but actually driving a possibly lethal machine while in that impaired state is. Just like getting drunk is not a crime, but driving while intoxicated is.
Come on. You can do better than this.
And what does this have to do with losing one’s license being a *criminal *function based on the danger you pose to other people? Perhaps Magiver is conflating administrative functions with criminal ones? Perhaps you’ve failed to grasp the context in which the quote you are responding to was presented?
Or perhaps Magiver was just wrong and hadn’t taken “Old People Who Can’t See” into account when he was talking about the reasons someone would have their driver’s licence revoked?
You’re just arguing semantics now anyway. It’s been pretty clearly established that driving is a privilege, because you need a licence to do it in the first place. And if you need a licence (or “permission”, if you will) to undertake an activity, it’s not a right. You don’t need permission to have rights. You do need permission to drive a car. This isn’t a hard concept to grasp.
Like the restriction that you must wear a seatbelt while driving.
The legislature decides what restrictions to impose on the right to drive. If you don’t like the ones they come up with, you can always elect someone else. The only restrictions that wouldn’t be “valid” would be those that really do violate some fundamental constitutional protection, and the courts can deal with those.
That happened to me around age 11, although it was an old car with a weak windshield compared to today’s glass.
I was stunned, and had a headache for a while. But in spite of an insurance-adjuster uncle who knew how to work the system for maximum $ reward, no doctors or tests could find anything wrong with me weeks later. Believe me, they tried.
Ralph Kramden: “You could bring doctors down from the *moon *to examine my head, Alice, and do you know what they’d find?! Nothing.” 
I consider not wearing a seat belt or a helmet to be foolhardy. Dumb. A choice for the retarded. I am opposed to mandatory seat belt laws for adults. At issue is not whether seatbelts (or healthful diets, moderate regular exercise, not skydyving or ascending cliffs, regular colonoscopies…) are “sensible.” At issue is whether or not laws should mandate such behaviours.
You have summarized the key argument against these types of laws: “You (government) are not the boss of me (when what I am doing affects only my personal boundary).” Exactly so.
This principle–personal liberty–turns out to be a fairly paramount driver in American culture. It is, perhaps, a broader issue than was raised in the OP but it is nevertheless the reason I am unhappy with such laws.
Proponents of mandatory seatbelt laws generally advance two arguments in favor of them: 1. It’s good for you. 2. It’s good for society because it saves money.
Both of these arguments are superficially persuasive and both break down when examined against the greater good of personal liberty. Both set precedents which result in absolute government power and both are so inconsistently applied as to not have any cogency at all.
1. "It’s good for you."
Down the nanny road lies totalitarianism. I am not at all surprised that the “rest of the civilised world” (Europe, for example) accepts mandatory seatbelts. I am not amazed, either, at Germany’s propensity to accept totalitarian authority in the first part of the last century. Proper order and a diminution of chaos is noble in theory and dangerous in execution. The principle of individual freedom has served America–and the world–well.
I am the boss of me. I am the boss only of me, but of me I **am **the boss, yes. I’m all I got. I have one life, and I would like to live it unfettered by your notion of what I must do. I do not want to constrained by law against those things that are bad for only me or affect only my personal physiology. We (SCOTUS, anyway) have found a protection of individual privacy in the Constitution. We have decided, essentially, that government may not control the “right to my own body” (to use a phrase commonly advanced by pro-abortion-right advocates). I hold that the core principle of me being in charge of behaviours that result in risk only to myself is greater than the principle that a government should be my nanny.
2. "It’s less costly for society and therefore we can mandate it."
First, this is only true if society elects to pay for the consequence of risky behaviour, so it’s a circular argument. We (society) can elect to not offer rescue helicopters for those stranded while mountain climbing, not to offer unlimited medical care for unprotected noggins injured in motocycle crashes and not to cover medical bills for unseatbelted drivers. We have other options as well; we can (and do, in fact) mandate insurance coverage for automobile operation and we can readily mandate that such insurance cover personal injury. It is not as if the only option available to society for ameliorating the cost of unbelted drivers is to mandate seat belts. Society (and individuals, for that matter) can protect themselves against costs generated by the witless without invading their personal liberty.
Second, an argument that proposes to govern personal risky behaviour under the premise that poor choices result in a cost to society opens the door to totalitarianism even more widely than simply protecting an individual from his own stupidity. Those who hold that this argument is cogent must–must–hold that governments are entitled to regulate what we may choose to eat, how often we exercise, and any other regulation which results in a net decrease in cost regardless of how restrictive it is to personal choice. I do not want to live in that world.
From the same dictionary:
It doesn’t change that he never said “it should be OK to run red lights and drive at reckless speeds, as long as nobody is around.”
I’m not going to play this game with you any longer.
Throwing in the towel is much easier than supporting your claims. And here I was hoping you were actually going to provide the cites you threatened to provide :rolleyes:
Okay, let me try and dial the snarkiness down. In my post, I pointed out that car insurance was not subject to normal market forces because many states have laws which make purchasing such insurance mandatory. You responded by saying that things like food are subject to normal market forces. Food and insurance are obviously subject to a different array of market forces but one of them is key for our purposes here: insurance is legally mandatory and food is not. Being as my entire point was how being legally mandated effected the price of a commodity, any examples of non-legally mandated commodities had no relevance to what I said.
Well I wouldn’t get all whiney about it but yes, that pretty much summarizes my point of view.
You’re not the boss of me and I’m not the boss of you. I shouldn’t have to submit to your will and you shouldn’t have to submit to mine. Both of us should be free to make our own decisions to as wide a degree as possible and not have to worry that other people are going to make us do what they think is good for us.
The link below is an article laying out the argument that driving is a right (the fundamental right to travel on public roadways) and the state has wrongfully usurped that right by requiring a state issued license to drive, thus unconstitutionally converting the right of the people into a privilege.
http://muckrakerreport.com/id18.html
Here’s another stating the only reason driving is considered a privilege is a combination of the state’s audacity and the people’s complicity.
The way I’d always looked at it is that driving is a right - you can drive all you want and in any manner you want, on your own property and no government official is empowered to prevent you from doing so. But if you want to avail yourself of the public road system that has been established and maintained by the government, then you may only do so if you abide by all the associated rules, and these rules are added to and changed from time to time, to suit the changing needs of each society.
There can’t be a fundamental right to enjoy a publicly provided system without following the publicly prescribed rules, can there?
Yes. The publicly prescribed rules are there to govern the safe operation of vehicles. There is no yardstick for applying laws to personal risk nor is there a constitutional mandate to do so. The absence of such a mandate leaves us with a document that was created around the concept of freedom to pursue life at our discretion and measure personal risk on an individual basis.
If you choose to skydive with a wingsuit or climb Mt Everest or eat 500 calorie hamburgers 3 times a day with double fries you risk your life.
Genuine question: why would you want to drive without wearing a seatbelt? It’s not as if you’re going to be dancing the fandango in there.
For the same reason people want to climb Mt Everest knowing the chances of becoming another frozen stepping stone for the next idiot.
There’s a bar I go to on occassion that has “bike night”. You can stand outside and count the number of people on one hand who show up with helmets .
The lack of helmet safety is mitigated by added safety of the loud pipes, obviously