Victoria suffered just under 300 deaths in road crashes in 2010. That’s a tragedy nearly every day, but it’s still a small fraction of the toll exacted by motor vehicles 40 years ago, when the road toll peaked at 1061 in 1970 (at at time when there were fewer people and many fewer cars). I couldn’t find a graph for Victoria but here is one for Australia as a whole, showing the same pattern with a slight lag as other states followed Victoria.
Anyone my age or older will remember that, after decades of accepting steadily increasing death rates as the price of mobility, Victorian governments of both political persuasions finally took the politically courageous step of enforcing higher safety standards – first seat belts and automative design rules, then effective techniques to catch and convict speeders and drink drivers, then helmet laws and more stringent license testing, among many others. Victoria’s interventions were eventually followed by other governments in Australia and elsewhere, but the lags are such that Victoria has gone from having some of the most dangerous roads in the world to having some of the safest. Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, these steps aroused plenty of opposition at the time, and the opponents were able to produce supposed experts to back their arguments.
What might seem more surprising is that even after four decades in which their claims have been refuted beyond any reasonable doubt, the same experts are still pushing the same discredited lines, and still finding a ready audience. With a closer look at the experts and their audience, this fact is perhaps less surprising, but still requires some explanation.
The arguments against road safety interventions are of two kinds, though they often intertwine. The first involve arguments against specific interventions, for example
* Seat belts increase the risk of death because people may be trapped in their cars rather than being “thrown clear”
* Variance in speed of vehicles matters more than average speed so we shouldn’t enforce speed limits
* Speed cameras/breath test machines are unreliable and give lots of false positives
* Restrictive vehicle design rules will raise costs, leading people to buy older/cheaper cars and reducing safety
None of these arguments stand up well to scrutiny, but I don’t propose to discuss them here. I’ll set up a sandpit for people who want to argue about specific cases.
The second is a general argument, purporting to show that any regulatory intervention to increase safety will be ineffective (although it is sometimes applied inconsistently by people who oppose some interventions but not others). The central idea is that any reduction in risk below the level that would arise in the absence of intervention will lead people to take more risks, wiping out (or, in some versions, more than wiping out) the first round benefits.
This kind of argument has been advanced (apparently without much cross-acknowledgement) by economists of whom the most notable is Sam Peltzman, under the name ‘rebound effect’, and by geographers, including John Adams, under the name “risk homeostasis”.[1] Adams in particular likes to cite “Smeed’s Law” a statistical relationship first estimated in 1949, which showed that, as the number of vehicles increased, the number of road deaths increases, but less than proportionally. Victoria fitted the Smeed’s Law pretty well until 1970, after which deaths fell sharply while the number of vehicles continued to rise. Nevertheless, Adams has continued to claim that both Smeed’s Law and risk homeostasis fit the data.
Of course, it’s not unusual to see academics pushing their pet theories long after the evidence has turned against them, and some degree of stubbornness in the face of contrary evidence is desirable – sometimes the disconfirming data is wrong, or is driven by a run of chance events. And, as anyone who has followed such debates will know, it’s always possible to tweak the data until you get the result you want. But you would think by now that the stunning success of Victoria’s interventions would have produced at least some admission that the theory and the data don’t fit too well. Not a bit of it. Adams, Peltzman and others are still behaving as if Victoria’s interventions had produced the increase in fatalities they predicted, and, as I mentioned, still getting plenty of airplay from prominent thinktanks.
The explanation of course is that Adams and Peltzman are libertarians, and the thinktanks that back them are similarly inclined. Peltzman checks just about all the US boxes – professor of economics at Chicago, fellow of AEI, Cato. Adams isn’t such a joiner, but he is clear enough on the political implications of the argument. For example, in explaining persistent belief in the effectiveness of seat belt laws, Adams writes
Why should the government be so assiduously promoting and inflating this myth? It has ready access to the numbers that disprove it. I offer a simple, cynical, explanation: it feeds the larger myth of the efficacy of government.
And, surprise, Adams is a global warming “sceptic”, quoting such eminent authorities as Benny Peiser.
There are obvious reasons why libertarians would like to believe that road safety laws are ineffective and that global warming is a hoax or fraud.[1] It is of course, possible to argue that, regardless of the benefits of seat belts, people should not be forced to wear them, but that argument doesn’t work for speed traps, RBT, and so on, unless you want to try the extreme Coasian view that such matters should be settled by voluntary agreement (Adams gives this view a nod in his paper Risky Business). Issues like road safety and global warming make it clear that our everyday actions such as driving a car impinge on each other in critical ways that can’t be resolved through the spontaneous operation of market mechanisms.
Sometimes, as with road safety, there is little alternative to direct interventions of the kind pioneered by Victoria. In other cases, as with global warming there is a choice between direct regulation (specifying permissible designs for all kinds of electrical equipment for example) and measures like carbon taxes and emissions trading which, while relying on government action in the first place, leave a lot of the hard work to market processes. A sensible libertarianism would seek to identify the latter cases and present arguments for market-oriented mechanisms.
Sadly, while there are individuals with libertarian inclinations who argue in this way, the libertarian movement as a whole has chosen the path of magical thinking, hoping that if they can keep coming up with debating points, problems like global warming will go away. The libertarian think tanks in the US and Australia are uniformly delusionist on climate change, as are the great majority of individual commentators who self-identify as libertarians[3] [4].
I suspect (and hope) there may be quite a few libertarians who aren’t that comfortable with the anti-science wishful thinking displayed on these issues, but prefer not to pick a fight with their fellow libertarians on an issue that may appear peripheral to their own concerns. I would urge any such to think again. Once intellectual standards are debased in this way, the damage cannot be contained. Bad arguments are accepted because they produce comfortable conclusions, or because they are put forward by political allies. This works (in a way) as long as you can assume that all the correct answers are known, having been revealed in some sacred text or another. But they imply (and reveal in the case of climate change) a total incapacity to deal with anything new. It’s not surprising, as I mentioned not long ago, that the free-market right hasn’t come up with any new ideas in decades. Like other movements that began with a radical openness to new ideas, they have become locked into a dogmatic orthodoxy, immune from empirical refutation.
fn1. Also put forward by psychologist Gerard Wilde.
fn2. It would be similarly convenient for socialists to believe that people aren’t motivated by economic incentives (or wouldn’t be if their consciousness was properly raised) – a large part of the disaster of communism was the attempt to act on this belief.
fn3. I should say that I haven’t seen anything specific from Peltzman on climate change. But, if he believes that the thinktanks with which he is prominently associated are badly wrong on a major scientific and policy issue, he ought to say so.
fn4. I am not interested in hearing from libertarians who conform to this stereotype, but I will establish a sandpit for those who feel impelled to restate their allegiance to tribal orthodoxy (with or without hedges and qualifications). On the other hand, if anyone wants to self-identify as a libertarian who accepts mainstream science as represented by, say, the IPCC or all the scientific academies in the world, I will certainly be interested.
John Quiggin 
@Dwight Towers
says ““Libertarian reluctantly calls fire department”
ROFL ….!!
There are so many aspects to this it is hard to know where to start.
1. I doubt that the other states followed Victorian on road safety. I was there in the 60’s when our NSW state government ran very effective road safety television road safety ads and campaigns. And I was there for the helmets and seatbelt introductions. NSW and Victoria at least moved together on these things. Queensland dragged the chain.
2. Through those years vehicles themselves have become safer to drive with better structure, steering, brakes, lights, and systems.
3. Drivers through that period improved in skills for many years and then, I believe, progressively dropped in skill.
3a. As vehicles increased in braking power and precision of steering drivers, have become to depend upon those abilities to where they advanced the accident risk threashold to the extent that largely nullifies the technology advances.
3b. With our aging population there is a higher percentage of older drivers who have entered the period of brain speed reduction and imaginary performance (this last point is a huge issue).
4. Driving while impaired, term which I pioneered in NZ to highlight the risks of driving while tired in a country which only saw alcohol and speed as the principle causes of accidents, has become a recognised major cause of accidents, particularly on highways.
5. Advertising pushes young drivers self imagined performance skills and abilities way beyond that which is real or safe. Where the military and the aviation industry recognise that “simulated” experiences significantly alter a persons reactions to physical events, the law fails to register that fictional hyperperformance visual experiences weaken a person’s natural self defences by extending their self imagined survival abilities way beyond the physical reality. And high performance car and motorbike manufacturers do not help by making and selling machinery that is capable of speeds up to 3 times higher than the national open road speed limits.
6. 7. 8. I’ll skip these and go onto the point that I would like to highlight…
9. Push bike helmets in their current form are dangerous. In blunt collisions these helmets may be helpful, however in glancing interceptions the performance properties of the materials that these helmets are constructed from combine to “bond” to rough surfaces causing the wearers head to stop moving while the body keeps traveling thereby causing neck injuries equal in severity, or worse than, the potential blunt impact head injuries that they are intended to prevent. I have a friend who is a quadraplegic due to this very effect following a cycle accident on a lunchtime ride before an anticipated round of afternoon business meetings. I am very sensitive to this issue having had a motorbike accident myself in August in which my 40 year old motorbike helmet (purchased at the time when helmets became compulsory) did do its job and protected my head as I tumbled down the road after my bike and I parted company at some speed (70 kph).
John,
At the risk of being grouped with the “anti regulatory” people, I note that in a situation where (as you list) a set of regulatory changes were made it is difficult to disentangle which have an effect and which don’t.
In particular, I would note that lower speed limits are different from the others in that while they have a positive effect on safety over a given period of time driven, they also have a negative effect by extending the time taken for a given trip and by (consequently) forcing more cars on the road at any given time and so increasing traffic.
So, lumping all critics together as “agenda driven” is not exactly a reasoned argument.
What SamB says is correct to s degree. However speeds have not changed very much natioanally in the last 10 years. What can change rapidly is strict numerical enforcement as Victoria experiences. Where the police rigidly enforce the numerical speed limit ie 60 means 60..61 equals afine and loss of points, drivers err on the side of caution by as much as 10 kph. And it does not require all drivers to slow down as the police know. Just 1 in 5 drivers travelling at 10 kph below the speed limit are sufficient to slow an entire corridor by as much. This is a formula for near gridlock. Victoria have been required to fit highway vehicle speed indicators in a number of locations to enable drivers to mentally calibrate their driving in the face of strict limit enforcement.
While the Professor’s point is well taken — there can be no doubt that taken as a corpus, regulation of driver behaviour and vehicle design by the state has reduced road trauma very significantly — the lowest piece of hanging fruit is road contention. Cutting the numbers of vehicles on the roads will cut road trauma even more markedly than the best of regulations.
As those who have read my posts will know I’m in favour of a lot more regulation of road usage but if we could cut road usage — especially in the peak and shoulder periods in urban areas and move hazmat and heavy transport off roads, road trauma would be smaller still.
@Sam
Hmmm
Interesting. I’d hate to be in a society where people who suffered serious injuries could be refused treatment merely because they’d been reckless. It would be even worse if they had chosen to extend their reckless risk trading to others — such as would be the case if their unrestrained children were travelling with them in the vehicle.
I’m not a fundamentalist on the question of course. Some personal discretion to take risks with one’s own health and safety should be permitted, but just as we ought to have a community standard of health provision so too we shoulod have a community standard for acceptable risk. We don’t allow folks to disregard flood warningf signs or go swimming in flooded creeks because we don’t feel right leaving them to accept the consequences of their stupidity and perhaps putting others at risk.
That’s fair enough.
Pr Q said:
FWIW I whole-heartedly endorse these sentiments with disrespect towards the free-market Right-liberals. Once upon a time I had alot of time for Friedman. But the ultra-liberal doctrine has long since ossified into a stale dogma, providing cover for obvious crooks.
But a not wholly charitable part of me can’t help suspecting that this criticism applies equally well to politically correct Left-liberals. The doctrine of social constructivism has long since run out of steam and is now a degenerate research program. Again, providing cover for charlatans and hustlers.
Which leads to the more general conclusion that liberalism, in its degenerate post-modern form, is now exhausted. Hence a the proliferation of fatuous triumphalism – “End of History”, “Washington Consensus”, “End of Grand Narratives”.
Clearly post-modern liberals feel they have nothing more to learn about the world and that all that remains is (crisis) management, damage control and dampening cognitive dissonance. How the flighty have fallen.
No wonder the PRC is cleaning up so thoroughly, they are under no such delusions.
I looked for Ken N’s most recent post on Catallaxy and it had a nasty personal attack on me. My crime was apparently correcting the falsehoods about science put forward by Ken N’s fellow travellers. It seems to me that for Ken, tribal loyalty trumps science.
There can be no doubt (in the minds of people who accept empirical evidence) that;
(a) the roads are safer (fewer deaths per passenger kilometer);
(b) road safety changes are a major contributor to this change; and
(c) improved eningeering of cars and roads plays a role also.
My educated guess is that the main measures in order of importance are;
1 Seat belts.
2 Alcohol and breath testing.
3 Speed limits.
4 Improved cars and roads.
The implementation of libertarianism advocacy would lead to little more than anarchy on the roads. Road deaths would skyrocket.
Having said that, there is also the issue of each citizen being entitled to freedom from onerous surveillance by the state. Current rules do not step over that line except for minor issues. Speed zones need to be rationalised. There are too many speed limits (from 40 to 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 100 and 110 at least) and too many changes of these limits along along various roads.
Electronic tagging of cars (to reveal position and speed by satellite) should never be implemented for example as this would be excessive surveillance of the citizen.
@Ikonoclast
Transponders for all, not just the rich! 😉
Tim – I take it that this was what you call a nasty personal attack:
“As Deltoid cycles through his three subjects: climate change, DDT and deaths in Iraq he occasionally picks up someone who wants to say “Yes, but…” They never finish the second word before the violence begins. I think he must have DDT on a watch list – just wait a minute, he will probably appear here with his trademark character assassination.”
Here is the full post. http://catallaxyfiles.com/2010/12/page/3/
If you are offended, Tim, of course I apologise.
But I am sure you agree that you are not gentle with those who disagree with or want to qualify anything you have said.
I was actually thinking of DDT, remembering the time I commented on your Prospect article here and you jumped in with what seemed to be verbal violence.
And I have no tribal loyalty, as you would know if you read more of my stuff at Catallaxy.
As I have said, we have more robust debates there than JQ does here or you do at your site.
Criticising electronic tagging by anyone who owns a mobile phone doesn’t make sense. You can just as easily be tracked by your phone.
If you do worry about such things then the transponder and information on it can remain your property. If you are electronically charged for use of a road or incur a speed phone all the government needs to know is the bill it will send you. Your information remains private unless you want a third party to verify the charges in the event of a dispute.
Knowing when you take breaks and average speeds are important for regulating safety in trucking. Currently this is done manually anyway.
And Tim, in case you have not been following I repeat (once more, with even more feeling) that I accept the consensus of AGW science. That is, I accept that he earth is warming, that humans are the main cause and that such warming will probably accelerate as positive feedbacks kick in.
Some (actually not many) at Catallaxy take a different view and I have made it clear there that I disagree with them.
“Fellow traveller” is a nice, old fashioned word. Wikipedia says it was originally Russian to describe someone who supported the revolution but failed to join the Communist Party. It seems that Trotsky used it first.
Do you know that it is now used for a gay travel site?
@ken n
I’m curious how you define “verbal violence” Ken and how someone as you put it “can have the bruises to show for it”. At what point does robust banter become verbal violence?
Having read your comment at the link, the adjectives that come to mind are self-serving, self-indulgent and condescending. You only come here when PrQ says something particularly dopey? Ah the burdens of being a liberal!
Of course, as you say, liberals are nicer because they respect other people. 😉
What can one do but laugh at this? What was the famous remark by Burns?
A lot of transport companies track their vehicles, they also monitor fuel consumption, time, speed and weight to determine the best combination of rig.
Thank you, Fran, you are the only one to have recognised that in my Catallaxy post I was trying to be (a bit) funny. And yes, humour is usually a bit self indulgent.
“At what point does robust banter become verbal violence?”
As Louis Armstrong said (about jazz) “if you’ve gotta ask the question, you won’t understand the answer”. BTW I strongly recommend Terry Teachout’s book “Pops” to anyone here interested in music.
@ken n
I’d call “verbal violence” actual threats, or at the very least, some sort of vilification on the basis of sex, sexual preference, ostensible ethnicity etc …
Merely pointing out robustly that people are mistaken or bring bad faith or poor scholarship to claims is not verbal violence, surely. Though Armstrong may well have been right on jazz, I doubt you can make this claim without specifying a set of criteria. It might be moot if you weren’t using the claim to traduce the standing of another, but of course you are.
IMO, you should rescind or warrant your claim.
Thank you for your advice Fran, but I have already apologised for any offence.
I think that should be sufficient.
@Fran Barlow
It’s not people’s feelings here that are salient, but the integrity of your claim (that you and other cothinkers have suffered “verbal violence” rather than robust critique) given that you haven’t actually resiled from it, but merely expressed your regret in extremis, at its impact.
I doubt you really think this is “sufficient” in any meaningful sense. This is really just a platitude indicating your indifference to the substantive question, which indifference suggests you made the claim out of pique rather than as a result of careful reflection.
One point that hasn’t had much attention is the contributing factor that advances in surgery and medicine would have in the reduction of the road toll. More victims are now saved than they would have been forty years ago.
@crocodile
That’s true, and likewise the management of road trauma by first responders is also better. There is increasing resort to helicopters which makes an especial difference in rural trauma cases.
Ken n, I am not getting involved in what seems to be a misunderstanding but how in the hell can you state that at Catallaxy there are more robust debates than herein? In my opinion JQ provides an alternative forum covering a wide range of subjects.
@Fran Barlow
Fran – I guess you dont even notice you indulge in verbal violence and ideological spin and jargon, far more often that you indulge in robust arguement. Praise be that others have noticed.
@Alice
But its nice to know who you wink at Fran…. so nothing changes and we get your non thinking parrot plagiarisms here… (especially BNC – Barry gets a plug whenever you can manage it…Barry of the “lets all go nuclear” BNC – probably specil protege of MQ management right now)
please dont think you fool the non libertarian community. You dont.
and as it doesnt say sandpit 300 – Im only too happy to engage you at the nearest sandpit Fran…
@Alice
Not only is your irony meter broken, but when it broke it took your perspicacity probe with it. As pointless and malign as you are, you have my sympathy.
@Donald Oats
I tried to make it clear in comment #19, that speeding and alcohol are quite separate (in my mind) to seatbelts and helmets. I support laws on the former category because they affect other people materially. In fact I would be even more harsh than current laws allow.
I confess I don’t understand your waiver scheme. Doesn’t the fact that an individual did not wear a seatbelt constitute an implicit waiver?
@ken n
Ken – he isn’t ALP, but a member of one of these tiny splinter parties which act as fronts for libertarian ideology
And one classic example in climate science is Lindzen with his Iris hypothesis.
Here is what I wrote that Ken N called “verbal violence” and “trademark character assassination” and reckoned was worse than anything you could find at Catallaxy:
I’ll let readers form their own opinions of his trustworthiness. And Ken, a fake apology is worse than no apology at all.
Actually ken n, I’ve always thought Tim Lambert was a perfect gentleman. (Some of the people who comment on his blog, otoh, aren’t.)
Back on topic, glibertarians are actually useful as you can rely on them to be consistently wrong. Or sometimes (in Feynman’s words) not even wrong.
I agree that Victoria has led the way in improving road safety in Australia. However there is still a lot that can be done. The three factors are drivers, vehicles and the road environment. Drivers under 25 still represent a large percentage of road deaths with speed still a big factor. Vehicles are safer but still more improvement is required. The standard of roads are also improving with better vertical and horizontal geometry and better intersection control (traffic signals and roundabouts). However the single biggest improvement to road safety would be to remove obstructions, mainly trees and utility infrastructure from the 10 metre wide clear zone on each side of rural roads. Potentially this simple act could reduce deaths and casualty accidents by about one third. However in my experience over the past 40 years I have yet to see any political support for any road network manager who tries to take this simple but effective step.
@ken n
It would be rather more accurate to say they carry a diversity of facts rather than a diversity of views. e.g. Sinclair Davidson linking to Terence Kealey’s piece which claims:
Sorry about the missing unquote in my last comment. Hope you can work it out.
@Chris O’Neill
How do you even make that quote format?
So far, I don’t see anyone accepting John’s invitation …
And I’m no help; although I self-identified as a libertarian in my downier days, I can’t make that claim anymore.
However, if you want an example of a Cato Institute fellow who accepts science, you need look no further than Julian Sanchez.
Henry Farrell cited that post in CT, so I assume John is aware of it. But no other examples spring to mind. Is Julian all alone?
jre – I have many times. Here, in response to JQ’s invitation and then when hc repeated it.invitation Neither acknowledged it.
Dunno what else to say, if you all are determined to repeat the claim that no libertarian accepts the science, I suppose you will.
Ken N:
Vs.
JQ:
Try again Ken, but this time opt for a real argument rather than a strawman.
@sam
You use the tags: e.g. [blockquote]How do you even make that quote format?[/blockquote] with the important difference that you use the lt/gt {} in place of the square brackets.
I will try to demonstrate using the HTML “script” tag, but am not sure that it will be recognised here:
oops: It didn’t work …
oh well … hold down SHIFT + COMMA (for LT) type blockquote SHIFT+GT quoted text SHIFT + COMMA (for LT) SHIFT + / type blockquote SHIFT+GT
jak:
This was the invitation from JQ I was responding to.
“…you could certainly strengthen your case with an unequivocal endorsement of mainstream science on AGW, especially if you presented it at Catallaxy.”
I did as he suggested. He did not acknowledge it.
hc’s repetition of the invitation (after I had done as JQ requested) was
“Ken N I agree with John. How about a post that simply endorses the conventional science of climate change and which clearly identifies the status of delusional theories in relation to the consensus?”
I did the former but declined to do the latter. I try to avoid personal abuse and referring to someone’s views as delusional is not something I will do. It’s enough to say I believe they are wrong.
I am not even sure how we got here. We were having a quite constructive discussion about road safety (remember the heading?) and JQ and I were in agreement on most issues.
Then someone the topic was derailed – I think it was one of those “you libertarians are all the same – you refuse to accept climate change” thrusts.
Foolishly, I responded and it went downhill from there.
Somewhere Deltoid popped up and accused me of being ride to him in what was intended to be a mildly satirical post at Catallaxy a while back. I apologised but he said the apology was false.
I have just remembered something that all this reminds me of. Many years ago, long before most of you were born I suspect, there was a radio programme called “Yes, what”*. It was about a totally out of control class of what sounded like 14 year old boys and a teacher who stood not chance, despite frequent use of the cane sound effect. One kid always got the teacher off the subject he was trying to teach and when the teacher realised what had happened the bell rang.
OK, I’m done. My resolution is that henceforth I will not write anything, comment on or otherwise
refer to AGW. My position is clear and, frankly, I don’t believe it matters in the real world out there what any of us think. Any action will be taken by people much bigger than us and I doubt they will check the blogosphere before deciding.
* I see that the last episode of Yes, what? was made in 1940. I am not quite that old – I heard rebroadcasts in the 50s.
There are a few literals in the forgoing, for which I apologise. The meaning is, I think, clear.
@ken n
My question to you concerns why you won’t either disavow or warrant your claim against Deltoid/Tim Lambert.
It seems to me that if you take yourself seriously, you are bound to do one or the other. This is not about anyone’s hurt feelings, except, perhaps, yours. It’s about whether you can allow a groundless claim to stand and yet invite others to rely on what you write. You say you libertarians respect other people, but one cannot respect other people if one misrepresents them. One is not releived of this obligation because in the case of those one finds culturally odious.
correction:
One is not
relievedrelieved of this obligationbecausein the case of those one finds culturally odious.Fran Barlow, if you are going to correct someone then you could have argued that Ken was wrong by stating bloggers do not move others in the real world. One only has to look at the number of politicians who now have personal websites and blog.
I should certainly mention Julian Sanchez, and will do so when I revise the post. And Jarrah Job, above, is another example of a libertarian who isn’t bound by tribal loyalties, in particular as regards AGW.
Unfortunately, in the case of Ken N, I find a lot of inconsistency between what he presents here and at Catallaxy – I hadn’t noticed the “particularly dopey” reference to me, linked above, but that’s par for the course in my experience.
@Fran Barlow I agree with you on universal healthcare; I don’t won’t to live in a society that refuses care to the reckless. The fact that costs are externalized to the decision maker IS an argument against UH, but such a weak one that all the myriad arguments in favour of it prevail easily. Using UH against the freedom to be reckless is also a non-starter. Society presents the individual with the gift of UH (a gift that cannot be refused), this should not reciprocally obligate the individual to comply with an unreasonable law.
I also agree with you on children. People should be forced to make proper provisions for those not able to adequately judge risks for themselves. I’m afraid I am a bit of a fundamentalist on this libertarian question though. I am against “community standards of acceptable risk” of any kind when it relates only to the safety of the individual concerned. Almost no one seems to agree with me, but it’s a basic moral axiom I hold, and i don’t recognize the right of society to decree otherwise. Even if everyone else in the country disagreed with me, I would not recognise such laws as just. I regard it as an example of the tyranny of majority.
I strongly resent the trend in western society towards “benevolent authoritarianism.” It has created a generation of timid and boring apartment-dwelling children and helicopter parents. Worse still, it causes adults to retain childish characteristics indefinitely, and to never discover their full independence. My childhood was spent barefoot, jumping out of trees into rivers, boogie-boarding down flooded creeks, trekking through taipan snake country days away from medical help. I believe it had a very positive effect on my character. I would gladly exchange a few more spinal injuries for a bit more backbone in this society.
I won’t argue this point anymore. I have no empirical evidence to give, my position is entirely a normative one. I only hope I have made explicitly clear which bullets I am prepared to bite.
@Fran Barlow
I’m not sure whether to thank you or not Fran. I think I liked it better when I thought all “quoters” were magic. You have pierced what should have been an ineffable mystery. The world is now just a little bit less special.
Ken said
This is a common device used on Catallaxy, to assume what others think, assume the position of spokesman for “everyone” and then announce in unequivocal terms the position, view or opinion. Those that question the majority groupthink Catallaxy position are not applauded for being courageous, they are invariably met with “verbal violence”.
I put it to you ken that the discussion(s) on Catallaxy has been very persuasive in that it has diminished the quality of the argument to the point of nonexistence. As Sinclair has pointed out on a few occasions his data indicates that Catallaxy gets a wide exposure and I would think that the level of discourse would offend most if not all it’s silent readers. It is certainly is an object lesson in how not to make friends and influence people.
Ken: “It’s enough to say I believe they are wrong.”
Perhaps you could explain to the “dopey” people here how that differs from “verbal violence”?
@sam
Sorry Sam, I missed that you had made the distinction; given that you have, the difference between me and you has shrunk somewhat.
Where there is still a gap, I suppose, is that I think that even in the case of choosing not to wear a seatbelt, there is a risk to others due to your choice. For example, if you are a back seat passenger and choose not to wear a seatbelt, then you are exposing any front seat passengers – indeed, anyone else in the vehicle – to the danger of being hit by a flying Sam, should a severe accident occur. Since the seatbelt is available, it seems reasonable to use it to minimise risk of harm to others (due to flying Sams) and to expect a sanction if you do not wear an available seatbelt.