“The idea of liberty is the unity, the only unity of the history of the world, and the one principle of a philosophy of history.”
- Lord Acton
Cyrus
Come on Billy Ray. Stand up to these morons. Stop perpetuating this society of nanny interference. Here’s the link to the actual stupidity, of course the comments are closed:
Consumer Interference
“Unfortunately, we’re not surprised by these grim statistics because a 2002 survey by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety showed that when parents were dropping teens off at school in the morning, nearly half the teens weren’t using seat belts.”
This is baloney. There’s no way to quantify what children are doing on their way to school in the morning across the entire country, whatever some statistician says about his margin of error. This goes for all polls that somehow show what every person in America is thinking or doing or whom they’re planning to vote for. I will leave aside the obvious point that if Consumer Reports had not brought it up, nobody would have noticed if she was wearing a seat belt or not because all of this is beside the real issue.
Seat belts are not important. Saving lives is not important. Utilitarian studies that claim to show the irresponsibility of other parents are not important - even if they ARE true. The government, the community, Consumer Reports, and parents who are not directly responsible for the children in question have no business dictating what other parents should be doing with their children unless it involves some sort of actual crime.
Billy Ray Cyrus should have the right to not wear a damned seat belt as should children and parents and citizens across the country - in real life, nevermind on a fictitious television show. This is what you call tyranny of the majority and it continues to get worse with every insignificant law pushed by boisterous soccer moms and whiney consumer advocates. Just wait until the minders of everyone else’s business are armed with universal health care as a weapon in their arsenal of “It costs me money so I should have a say in what you’re doing” argument strategies. I anxiously await the day I can no longer go snowboarding because my broken wrist costs President Obama tax money.
The individual is more important than the community. Saving freedom is more important than saving a life, and protecting the personal sphere of freedom far outweighs reducing the number of lives lost by seatbelt wearing. Once we grant the community and the government the power to tell us how to live our lives, we forfeit the right to live them as we choose. There is no compromise or middle ground in this battle. That is the most important lesson that can be gleaned from every moment of history from the instant man conceived his first rational thought to the second I put a period at the end of this sentence.