Stickshifts and Safetybelts – Cake
Michelle Cottle makes this bizarre comment about seat belt laws:
Yes. I’m well aware of the stats showing that mandatory seat belt laws save lives. I myself feel more secure wearing a seat belt–and did even before I bought a car with one of those migraine-inducing systems that beeps at me every single time I briefly unbuckle my belt at a stoplight to reach back and pick up whatever toy/book/juicebox my child has dropped on the floor. But if I chose not to wear a seat belt, it shouldn’t be anyone’s business but my own.
Seat belt laws are a classic example of government overreach. Unlike most other road rules I can think of, failure to buckle up does not impact the safety of anyone other than the adult making the decision. My wearing a seat belt does not make me a better driver, nor does it decrease the odds of injury to others involved in a crash with me.
I know it’s not a particularly important issue in the grand scheme of things. But seat belt laws really do save lives. These aren’t pretend lives. They’re real, tangible ones. Children who aren’t orphaned. Parents who don’t lose their teenage kids. Friends who get to keep hanging out.
I don’t think it’s the job of the government to regulate every element of life. But I also think it’s a desperately unpleasant perspective on the role of the state to think that it has no role to play in fostering behavior. That it’s purely a regulatory beast that exists to take taxes and provide services.
Clearly, there isn’t an a prior case for state intervention in all walks of life. But…given that seat belt laws impose zero meaningful harm on society and they provide a very tangible benefit, I don’t see how this is a particularly controversial case.
But in a broader sense, phrases like “shouldn’t be anyone’s business but my own” and “government overreach” suggest to me that going down the privacy route of rights protection may carry with it a lot of unfortunate attitudes. The right to privacy obviously exists (even Sarah Palin agrees!) and it’s important. But the problem with privacy is that it’s purely about toleration. A right to abortion founded in privacy accepts the premise that abortion is bad but says that the state simply isn’t allowed to regulate it – as much as it might rightly wish to. Lawrence v. Texas was obviously great, but is troubling to the extent that it implies that same sex acts may well be despicable – but are simply beyond the reach of the state to prohibit.
The effect of the law doesn’t change much, but the attitude toward it, it’s durability in practice, and its interpretive effect does change. There is a world of difference between a right to abortion based in privacy and one based in equal protection. In the first case, your right is to non-interference by the state in this decision. In the second, your right is to control over your own reproductive status and identity. In the case of Lawrence, there’s a difference between saying that states aren’t allowed to regulate the practice and saying that there is a basic right to sexual expression. The point being that we ought to care about living in a society where people are affirmatively valued as equal citizens regardless of their sexual orientation or gender, rather than one where difference is tolerated (grudgingly).
So I’m definitely not against privacy. It’s an important foundational right. But I am troubled by the extent to which it’s treated as the sufficient way of regarding the reach of the state. Where seat belt laws are implicitly equated with abortion (at least to the extent that the role imagined for the state is one principally one of non-interference). As if the only relevant question is whether it’s your personal decision – rather than the real issue, which is the sort of society we want to live in.
It’s legitimate to regulate seat belt habits because it saves lives, it reduces health care costs, and reduces insurance costs (all public goods), and because there is clearly no meaningful right to drive a car while not wearing a seatbelt.