Reflections on Forced Buckling
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Reflections on Forced Buckling By order of the state, New Yorkers are being compelled to bind themselves up in the front seats of their cars for no offense greater...
...Therefore, the state has the right and duty to use its powers to keep down these costs, as well as the costs of supporting all those widows and orphans left by all those drivers who fly through windshields because their seat belts are not fastened securely...
...Let's concede that the buckled belts do save on medical costs...
...they mug us in our own best interests...
...The Pure in Body Behind the seat-belt explosion one can detect the new moralism: Thou Shalt Not Smoke...
...Can it be that one's automobile trunk is a more privileged area than one's bodily trunk...
...For several years Americans mildly accepted having to pay for seat belts, fore and aft, along with all the other unwanted items that car companies and dealers load on the cowed buyer...
...Their solicitude often takes the form of constraining others...
...Studies of the impact of seat belts on the impact of cars, in the words of one enthusiast, show that "Belted accident victims are half as likely to die from injuries as those who are not buckled in...
...And the police must still have some additional justification for opening a car's trunk...
...The tendency of the courts to deny to drivers the rights to privacy accorded pedestrians is a troubling matter to the Civil Liberties Union, which opposes roadblocks to catch drunken drivers...
...If we are traveling this road, a much stronger case can be made that the state ought to come into homes to padlock the liquor cabinets...
...Why put police to the hazardous and unlucrative duty of confronting drug merchants when they can annoy families out for a picnic...
...After all, the driver who refuses to belt up may be a direct peril to himself and possibly to his family: the fellow who can't refuse a belt of bourbon is a threat to everybody in the vicinity...
...Yet consider...
...Well, then, there must be cases in which seat belts forestall death only to leave the wearer with injuries that keep him hospitalized for a long time and require expensive methods of treatment...
...Will the advent of national health insurance bring with it new coercive measures designed to make us all take better care of ourselves...
...Some 90 per cent of drivers have exercised their freedom of choice, however misguided, by scorning to use the belts...
...Is every action or lack of action that is deleterious to one's own health or safety now to be ruled a social disease...
...Thou Shalt Not Eat Red Meat or the Yolk of Yon Egg...
...That would at the least be fairer than such actuarial finaglings as raising the insurance premiums for all young drivers because some of them are likely to get into accidents...
...And let's not consider the probability that the seat-belt law will be observed most conscientiously by the most careful drivers...
...And let's not quibble over the number of injuries that belts have inflicted or the accidents these restraints on drivers might have caused...
...No relief can be expected, for even the New York Civil Liberties Union, friend to the shackled, has decided that laws of this kind do not constitute a civil liberties issue...
...Can it be that the bad guys have been right, that once the state's snout is in the door, we must welcome its claws and hoofs...
...Milk and Water Some proponents, carried away by visions of themselves as pioneering microbe hunters, have compared seat-belting to the chlorination of drinking water and the pasteurization of milk, a comparison that demonstrates not the similarity but the difference between useful public health measures and intrusions on personal decisions about one's own person...
...Such will be their condition with the turn of the year, when the state's mandatory seat-belt law, the first in the nation, is imposed on them...
...it is a privilege granted under strictly regulated conditions...
...A more apt comparison is the great cholesterol epidemic, another source of lamentation among health publicists...
...Perhaps that is mere frivolity...
...Mothers in my youth were wont to yell: "If you catch cold, I'll kill you...
...But keep the law out of it...
...Does the "social cost" argument necessarily translate into an official mandate to buckle up...
...Americans would doubtless be better off if they ate less fat, but so far no one has proposed fining people who like bacon and eggs for breakfast...
...New Jerseyans are due to be bound in March, and residents of Illinois in July...
...That way, knowing the odds, drivers could take their chances like unconsenting adults...
...The jury in Ontario, Canada, that reduced the damages in an accident case because the victim was not wearing a seat belt had the right idea—place the responsibility on the individual and let the penalties follow...
...Whatever happened to Prohibition...
...But, the seat-belters' argument proceeds, these days many of us are covered by government health plans and many more have medical policies that are in part subsidized by tax breaks...
...To which a state legislator in Michigan who favors seat-belt laws responds: "No, they should not...
...Would it follow that persons who buckle up should be fined if caught...
...Even as the Moral Majoritarians seek to redeem us by banning abortion clinics and pornographic magazines, the fanatics of fitness and safety are determined to save sinners from blocked arteries, contaminated lungs and busting their heads on windshields...
...Conservatives have long argued that where government money goes, government controls must follow...
...Since a seat belt affects only one's own injuries, the question has been put: "Shouldn't people be able to decide for themselves...
...Let the pure-in-soul-and-body edify the benighted, let the trim proselytize the gluttonous and the cautious admonish the careless...
...Dying is sort of un-American...
...No doubt many will make the wrong choices, which is merely a price of freedom...
...The diseases carried by unpasteurized milk and unchlorinated water can be contagious, and it is unreasonable as well as burdensome to ask each family to do its own pasteurizing and chlorinating...
...Now, under penalty of law, the New York State driver and his seatmate must wrap themselves in the things or hand over $50 whenever caught untrussed...
...Injuries and lost wages caused by the nonuse of belts cost society $2,500 per accident...
...Aren't liberals concerned lest the seat-belt law certify fears that other welcome innovations will be accompanied by still further invasions of our liberties...
...As the fashion catches on, how many state legislatures will be able to say no to so virtuous and easily enforced a way to squeeze a few more dollars out of otherwise law-abiding citizens...
...Those Social Costs Let's grant that all the figures on how many lives and dollars seat belts have saved or might have saved are correct, although they do not always seem to be models of statistical science...
...Thou Shalt Jog and Enjoy Aerobics and Lie on the Floor and Raise Thy Legs To Music...
...Because most of us are covered by some sort of accident insurance, the argument goes, no injury is an island unto itself...
...Why have civil libertarians not risen against this form of preventive detention...
...It is estimated that each traffic fatality costs the state and family about $333,000...
...It's an old lesson: Beware of groups that come bearing prescriptions for everybody's behavior...
...The bell tolls for all in the form of higher insurance rates...
...His reasoning is a fair summation of the case for compulsion: "Accidents always involve other people...
...Suppose that in such circumstances death would be cheaper for the insurance company and, thus, for all its other customers...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Reflections on Forced Buckling By order of the state, New Yorkers are being compelled to bind themselves up in the front seats of their cars for no offense greater than wanting to drive to a local movie...
...Just give us the facts, please, and permit grown-up sinners to elect their way of life or death even as they elect their leaders...
...They create major social costs: Lost work time, lost wages, high medical bills and welfare outlays...
...Injuries and death disrupt families...
...This has exasperated the safety cabal...
...Once it was ruled that children must be strapped into their seats, was it ordained that adults would feel the strap, too...
...Even so, it would be less oppressive and more equitable, not to mention persuasive, if insurance companies simply paid less for injuries or deaths to unbuckled persons in car accidents than to buckled persons...
...The seat-belt law will prove popular, count on it...
...Is anyone reassured by the health vigilante who has settled the issue of "personal freedom" to her own satisfaction by noting that "operating a motor vehicle is not a right...
Vol. 67 • November 1984 • No. 21
