I had to drop in and comment on the motorcycle helmet and libertarians.

On helmets, one could make an argument (thought it’s a bit of a stretch, that a cyclist without a helmet is a really big bullet when he gets hit in the face with flying debris and bike lodges itself in a car killing it’s occupants.

I would posit, though it’s just a guess, that if accident and fatality “rates” are increasing (rates is in quotes because I find the term gets applied liberally, rather than properly) it would be due to many more people than normal joining the ranks of riders late in life. I will always believe that folks that have ridden bikes on dirt tracks (usually a youth activity) and know better how to play at the edges of control will be less likely to fall prey to anything other than bad judggement.

Lastly, libertarians are no less diverse than so called “conservatives” and “liberals”. They are in fact quite diverse and so our generalizing is not likely doing them or the label good service.

I am a motorcyclist with a crotch rocket (smallest one, 600cc). Before I rode a motorcycle I practiced wearing gear while on other peoples smaller bikes. I go with no less than a jacket (body armor, not just a leather thing), a helmet (full face snell + DOT), and gloves.

If I don’t have those pieces of equipment, I will not ride PERIOD. I also regularly wear armored boots & have just bought thick (1.2-1.4mm) leather pants. The only accidents I have been in were as follows

1) I signaled a right turn in no traffic (just one car several car lenghts behind me , and was in the left side of a 1 lane road with parallel parking spaces next to the lane. The person behind me, after I signalled CUT TO MY INSIDE ILLEGALLY THROUGH PARKING SPACES & cut me off and passed me in a little 12 year old econo-crapbox.

I STOPPIED (yay for good brakes) and flipped over the handlebars at sub 20mph, the back of the bike went vertical.

To this day I know the guy was so close passing me, I could have reached out & grabbed his door handle over my handlebars while I was going vertical/forward.

2) I was riding in December and hit some sand/salt/gravel and I lowsided.

In both cases I ended up sliding across the ground for several feet on concrete & I came out without a scratch.

Regarding helmet visibility>

Not having peripheral vision in a helmet is the absolutely wrong reason to not be wearing one! If you took an MSF course you would know this, as you have several safety zones measured in “seconds” with the longest one being 12 or 13 seconds out! You should ALWAYS know who is around you, where your escape routes are, etc when riding a motorcycle (and probably a scooter or bicycle as well). Also, many reports have been done (I believe the hurt report is one) about helmet vs non-helmet use & visibility being a factor in crashes. It simply is not a factor on people wearing helmets.

I did indeed couch that argument poorly (it was quite late and I am no wordsmith even at my best). I should not have attributed the individuals’ action to a particular value. I don’t know why people ride/drive without helmet/seatbelt (foolishness would be my best guess). I’m not sure your hypothetical scenario is of value though. Given that information, would not your biker forgo riding his bike that day? Riding a motorcycle is inherently dangerous. I myself wouldn’t ride one. When deciding to ride a motorcycle, an individual has (likely unconsciously) decided that x amount of enjoyment on a bike is greater than y probability of being killed/injured. People are (rightly) allowed to make this decision because government does not have access to the information necessary to make such a determination. Why shouldn’t this freedom be extended to helmet use?

akatsuki:

I’m sure many people adhere to libertarian philosophy out of selfish reasons. But you are arguing that the government should spend money it has taken (under threat of force) from me (among others) to support a campaign (click it or ticket) that I do not support. Is that not selfish as well?

whatdoiknow1:

Wow. Just, wow. Perhaps you should hire an editor (and a therapist and tutor as well).

And lets face it – with regards to seatbelts and many other health and safety issues there is a compelling argument – it saves money

And it saves ME money

the less people that wind up needing emergency assistance, the less of my tax money is needed to pay emergency responders and medical professionals their salary

wear your helmets and leathers you squids, I don’t want to pay to wipe you off the road the next time you drop your bike.

A study I saw referenced indicates that helmets reduce peripheral vision by about 3%. That’s not much, unless the guy who hits you who you didn’t see was in an area obscured by that 3%. I suppose that you can turn your head that much more to make up for it, but I’m guessing that there are a few instances when people don’t.

I’m not against motorcycle helmets. If I valued my life so little so as to sit atop a street bike, I’d probably wear a helmet, full body armor, a Michelin Man suit and a couple of Trojans to be as safe as possible.

What I’m questioning is whether helmets create enough benefit to the society that all of us benefit by requiring individual riders to wear them.

Based on the numbers, I’d say it’s debatable. The reason I say this is that statistics about motorcycle accidents are horrifying, and it is clear that helmet laws have failed to reverse them. Every year, the fatality and injury rates are increasing. While I wouldn’t blame the helmets per se, they clearly aren’t potent enough to do anything to reverse the numbers.

In other words, motorcycles are inherently dangerous in comparison to cars. The combination of speed and a lack of crush space make for a deadly and injurious result. Whether a helmet adds enough benefit to change this reality, I don’t know, but it obviously hasn’t been enough so far to lower the fatality statistics.

If society really cares about the toll, then the obvious answer would be to ban motorcycles, because helmets alone obviously don’t do very much. But as a free people, we have decided to accept the price and allow riders to choose whether they wish to roll the dice.

I can live with that. If I have to pay a few bucks to take care of some of those who are hurt, I can accept that price as part of the cost of living in a republic, where people are free to make choices without consulting with their spreadsheets and accountants.

pch101 is absolutely right about the insurance argument slippery slope. not to mention, keeping my insurance premiums a little lower is a pretty poor motivation for wanting other people not to be maimed or killed in auto accidents. i can understand why insurance companies think that way, but i can’t understand why the rest of us would.

For years I drove without seatbelts, untill I received a $75 ticket. From then on, using them was automatic.

One day, someone came across 6 lanes of trafic and hit me head on. The seatbelt law save my life and I consider the $75 fine my best investment.

the trouble with your response is that you’re claiming that a person’s values are to be inferred from their actions. if i don’t wear a helmet on my motorcycle, it means that i value my hair’s freedom more than my own physical safety. but isn’t it more likely that if i’m not wearing a helmet, it’s because i value my hair’s freedom as well as my own physical safety, but i just don’t take seriously the possibility that i might get in a crash?

imagine telling your average non-helmet-wearing motorcyclist that he is, for sure, no doubt about it, going to get in an accident on his bike on wednesday. do you think he’d bring his helmet on wednesday? or do you think he’d say, all along i’ve valued my hair’s freedom over my own physical safety, so why should i change now?

While there is much to admire in libertarian philosophy, it is often just a convenient disguise to pure selfishness or other ignoble motives. For example, following the dictum of “your rights end where mine begin”, a true libertarian might require people to pollute a big fat zero, since that is something that imposes costs on other people and violates their rights. No carbon credits or other nonsense, but an actual requirement to sequester the pollution you produce no matter what the cost. Government exists to handle the collective action problem of dealing with small injuries that affect many people but not individually enough to force action…

Society does mandate some actions and behavior becuase it is in the overall best interst of our society at large. 99% percent of us are incapable of managing our lives after we suffer a major life changing injury. All this talk about, “I have insurance” is a bunch of BS! What you have is a policy with a private company that can go out of business and leave you high and dry. Yet you do live in a society were someone or something else is supposed to be there to step in and help your self-induced cripple a$$ wipe yourself when mutual of whatever decides to do a disappearing act.

Personally I have the right to NOT see your sorry a$$ get ejected through your windshield because YOU decided your too cool to wear your seatbeat. As a society we have a right to enact rules to protect us all. Notice that we do NOT triage non-seatbelt wearing accident victims in the emergency room! Maybe we should! Why allow fools to clog up our limited medical infrastructure with self inflicted injuries? Also the seatbelt law is meant to protect the OTHER passangers in the car! Front seat passangers have been crushed by unbelted drivers and vise versa. Pregnant women have lost babies because they were unbelted. Unbelted rear-seat passangers routinely kill front seat passangers in collisions. So how much auto insurance do you have??????

Same with motorccyle helmets, maybe the police, fire, and EMS services should just ignore helmetless motorcycle accident victims. Why should society devote resources to fools that would ride a 100hp motorcycle without at least a helmet! I am sure the majority of folks here would be highly offended if the county sent them a bill for cleaning their son’s or daughter’s brain off the highway!

Are you serious? Do you ride? I do. I’ve been riding for 7 years. I have a full face and a shorty helmet. NEITHER helmet restricts my vision in any way. I have been in a low speed crash with a helmet that saved me TONS of money because it put a ding in my helmet rather than my skull. I shudder to think what would have happened had I not been wearing the helmet. Does wearing a helmet make anyone a safer rider? I don’t know, but it can mean living to see another day.
In a high-speed crash, a helmet probably will not do much, just like a seatbelt/airbag combo probably won’t help you in a high-speed crash in a car. That is not what the safety features are designed for, they are designed to make low to medium speed (below 40-45mph) accidents survivable. You notice how even the non-government “watchdog” safety organizations don’t crash test above 40mph? It’s because crashes above that speed greatly increase the probability of serious injury/death.
IMO if someone doesn’t want to wear a helmet/seatbelt, they need to have their head examined. I agree with an earlier poster that given the lax enforcement of seatbelts (helmets are more diligently enforced and rightly so), it’s almost a non-issue. It’s mostly used as a reason to pull over suspicious characters to see if they are up to no good and add charges to drunk/reckless drivers (they infringe on your right to life, especially if they kill you in an accident).

The inclination for libertarians is to argue that everything is acceptable just so long as it creates no harm to others. That’s a fair theory, but when applied to specific situations, it becomes clear that this is difficult to apply because the lines of demarcation among individuals are not clear.

In my mind, the seat belts are a no-brainer in favor of the mandate. You owe me your presence in that seat if you are going to pilot a vehicle, and that belt will undoubtedly help to keep you there. The inconvenience to you because of the mandate is effectively non-existent (if you have a psychological hangup about wearing a belt, that’s frankly your problem, not mine), so the scales tip heavily in favor of the law.

Motorcycle helmets are another issue. Helmets don’t help motorcyclists to ride any better. If anything, they may make their riding worse by limiting their visibility.

Imposing such laws based upon pooled insurance costs is a verrrrrry slippery slope that leaves plenty of room for abuse. For example, using that as a benchmark, I should have the right to force you to reduce your meat intake, eat more fiber and get more exercise, because your failure to do so costs me money in higher health care costs.

In the case of motorcycles, if the goal is for society’s dollar savings, then we would be better off keeping people off of motorcycles entirely, as the data suggests that safety enhancements are of little to no benefit to motorcyclists. While truck and passenger car fatality and injury rates are falling quickly, they are rising dramatically for those on the bikes, and are substantially higher than they for every other vehicle class. (The intrinsic lack of crumple space must have a lot to do with that.)

Using costs, revenues and profits to determine social justice is never a good idea. Freedoms and restrictions should be based upon balancing individual freedom and social responsibility, not on whether it purportedly makes or saves someone a buck to take a liberty away.

If cash is king, then I can assure you that it won’t take long before we have no freedoms at all, because practically everything can be forbidden on the basis of that argument. You can also bet that with that mentality, the fines and punishments meted out for failing to comply would be motivated by money, rather than justice.

Actually some motorcycles now have ABS & Traction Control (ABS: I think the FJR and Goldwing can be purchased with ABS, and the new gixxr’s have traction control). I think the Goldwing has an airbag option.

All:
I am all for people being able to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t affect me. Unfortunately in an interdependent society this seems less & less possible without regulation.

People can drive without a seatbelt as long as they aren’t in MY insurance plane and MY Premiums don’t go up when they are critically injured.

People can ride without a helmet as long as they aren’t in MY insurance plan… (blah blah see above).

People can take out interest only sub-prime loans as long as MY TAX DOLLARS are not going to bail out the banks or the homeowners down the road.

We have all these bad choices by other people that we can’t control that affect us and have no say in, yet insurance industries are able to discriminate on items that we simply can’t control:

I have been refused health insurance because I wear hearing aides & hearing loss is a pre-existing condition! This is something I was born with and is not fixable!

My car insurance has gone up slightly because I’ve made about 6-7 claims in a 2 year period. ALL CLAIMS EXCEPT ONE were vandalism (keying) or people hitting my car/motorcycle while it was parked! Why should my insurance go up? I didn’t do anything wrong. I was threatened by the insurance company that if I made more claims they’d drop me!!!

The list goes on… The question becomes — where do you draw the line between personal freedom for an individual and the right for another unrelated individual to not be harmed?

So my personal outlook has been that most people are screw-ups and really don’t care about others. My plan is to move to away from people and have their bad choices affect me as little as possible.

I am currently in a large city (Chicago area), however I would love to move 50-60 miles out & commute in by train/bus/bike (or some combination).

Living in a rural area brings lower property prices & less instability in property prices.

Living in a rural area probably will allow me to have a house with a garage so that people can’t (easily) key or hit my car when it’s parked.

Living in a rural area will cost me alot in commuting time & $, but in my opinion is well worth it.

Living in a rural area generally brings less crime. (The bank around the corner from me was robbed 2x in a week about 2-3 weeks ago!)

As for legalizing drugs, if we put 1/100 of the money we spend in the so called “war on drugs” on education and rehab, and improving the social conditions that cause drug abuse, like poor schools, we would have a much smaller drug problem. In countries where drugs have been legalized, there has been no huge increase in addicts. The truth of the matter is, the “war on drugs” is big business. From weapons manufacturers all the way to the prison industry, there’s a lot of people making money off it. The idea of putting a drug user in jail instead of in rehab seems ridiculous until you realize that they have become a form of slave labor. Then it starts to make sense. http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20041205.htm

You can. They call them “motorcycles.”

I’ll suggest you read the wiki article on Libertarianism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism

I talk to Libertarians whenever I encounter them. I even used to lean towards the philosophy myself. They do frequently say things like “all drugs should be legal”. (I used to believe that myself) So, I don’t believe I’ve built up a strawman. IMO they don’t think hard enough about the effect of individual decissions on the whole society.

Please don’t quote Galbraith. That guy has been proven to be wrong more often than a broken watch. He is the poster child of the ivory tower idiots of North America. I would put much more faith in your thoughts than his, anyday.

There isn’t any economist who hasn’t been proven wrong numerous times. The only purpose of the Galbraith quote was to emphasize that one should take everything economists say with a grain of salt.

First: blau, your assertion is that the fact that some people don’t wear motorcycle helmets (while riding a motorcycle) is prima facie evidence that many people do not act in their own best interest. The fallacy in this is that you are imputing your values to all people. Some people evidently value whatever sense of freedom they feel from riding sans helmet more than they do their life and health. I agree that this is foolish, but it is not my decision to make. There are many instances in which people do not act in their best interest. Have you ever seen a morbidly obese individual eating a Big Mac and french fries? Is this not self-destructive behavior? I myself have 4 partially torn ligaments in my knees as well as torn cartilage in each (I have had an ACL reconstruction so I know well the pain of surgery) and yet I play hockey twice weekly. Is this self-destructive? I am close with someone who suffers from severe depression yet refuses to see a counselor or take medications. He writes poetry and music and his art thrives (or so he says) on his pain. Should any of these behaviors be regulated?

Gregzilla: Please do not flippantly bandy the General Welfare Clause. There is tremendous debate as to the actual meaning of those words and the powers they grant (James Madison tied them to the other enumerated powers while Alexander Hamilton held a more liberal view; the debate predates the ratification of the Constitution.)

David Holzman: I agree entirely that consumers rely on imperfect (or a dearth of) information when making their decisions. The alternative, however, is a cabal of politicians making decisions for everyone based not only on incomplete information but often on ulterior (or worse, sinister) motives. The idea that any of our three remaining presidential candidates or our fine congresspeople are well equipped to regulate the minutiae of daily life for a nation of 300 million is specious.

What is nice is that the discussion seems to be pretty intelligent and rational.

It’s not the Libertarians are always wrong (nobody bats 1000) it’s just that they always want to take things to extremes. Many times, if you bring up the right examples, Libertarians might agree with some regulation.

As a matter of law and public policy should racial discrimination be allowed in employment or housing? Hey, it’s your company. It’s your appartment building. Shouldn’t you be able to do exactly as you like?

Should we really let people smoke crack if that’s what they want to do? Should we really take the junkies expressed preferences at face value? Is this really the life they want? Or do we know there is a better life if we can prevent them from becoming addicts. (Whether or not our drug laws actually deter anyone is another matter altogether).

How much laxity can we really live with? Can you play your stereo as loud as you want, or do I have some right to peaceful enjoyment of my property? Do we need a regulation here?

It seems self-evident to me that we need plenty of regulation in life. Do we go overboard at times? Sure. But then, there’s that old saying – Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Dynamic88, not to pick on you, but maybe you should read this wikipedia link: Logical Fallacies , then go back and read your post.

Specifically, you pigeonhole libertarians as something they’re not, then attack that false image of libertarians you’ve build up. It’s called the Straw Man fallacy. I’m not sure if you’re doing it on purpose, and that method does rile people up, but it’s a dishonest argument. Demagogues, like talk radio commentators, do this all the time. Are you a demagogue?

Anyways, to contribute to the discussion, I think the government should get rid of laws to protect the stupid from themselves, and let natural selection do the rest. This way, the best genes survive. For example, helmets on motorcyclists. If you want to be an idiot and not wear your helmet, be my guest – you should be free to make that decision.

But I’m open to discussion. Someone, please tell me why I’m wrong.