Against Liberty
Everything is not a matter of opinion and all opinions are not equal. In the US, we frame all policy arguments in terms of liberty, and since we don’t teach critical thought, who wins the framing dispute wins the argument.
My 85-year-old mother in law had her life saved by the excesses of the nanny state that made an elderly woman pay more for a car with a bunch of air bags. You can’t think of air bags at my age without thinking of how seat belts destroyed liberty.
First, they were optional, at the princely cost of five bucks.
Then they were mandatory and the cost of a new car went up accordingly.
Then, all of a sudden, there were jackbooted thugs on every street corner giving out tickets to people who failed to buckle them. A case went all the way to the Supreme Court from a suburb of Austin where the issue was whether a citizen of this free nation could be taken into custody for failure to buckle up. The answer was yes.
One of those jackbooted thugs, a friend of mine, was rushing to an armed robbery in progress call when he was t-boned by another police officer making the same call at high speed. It took most of a day to find the severed rear end of his unit, which had flown into the air and come down between two buildings. That part of the car contained the seat belt anchors. Had he been belted in, he would…
