[teh64]

This is why the libertarian argument does not make sense to me.

You crashing without a seatbelt and dying harms others as well:

1. Your body as a projectile could harm others.

2. The emotional harm of others seeing your dead body and the horrific injuries. Also the emotional harm on your friends and family.

3. The increase to my taxes and healthcare costs because people have to deal with your dead body. Also, if you almost die when going through the windshield, the costs are much greater trying to save your life than if you wore a seatbelt, as the injuries will be greater and could require things like air ambulances etc...

4. Your body being unrestrained means that your car can cause way more damage, including hitting other cars or pedestrians and injuring and killing them.

It is not a victimless crime.

[throw0101a]

Which is also why I don't think motorcycle helmet optionality makes sense from a "freedom" point of view either:

1. If your melon hits the ground and splatters open, there's going to a crash scene investigation that closes down the road for many hours, causing traffic chaos. As opposed to a helmet protecting you, where you're more likely to survive, and hobble off the road and get of the way of traffic.

2. Insurance companies generally do not have policies that offer helmet-optional and helmet-mandatory options, so if a motorcyclist who does not wear a helmet gets into a crash and needs a payout (life, or medical treatment), then those riders who do wear a helmet (which tend to have less severe injuries, and thus smaller payouts) have larger premiums through no fault of their own. At the very least there need two different types of policies.

[_heimdall]

1. I'm not sure how that would happen in practice. If my body is the projectile, they would have to be immediately in front of my vehicle as it slams into whatever it hit. My body is likely the least of their problems in that scenario.

2. Emotional harm is a very difficult thing to protect against. In no way am I waving it off as unimportant, but people can be emotionally harmed by literally anything. We can care about that, but we can't easily regulate for it.

3. There is much lower hanging fruit if you are concerned with the societal cost of an unhealthy population. If we get to body disposal as top of the list I'll feel pretty damn good about where were at.

4. Isn't 4 the same as 1?

[gambiting]

>>I'm not sure how that would happen in practice. If my body is the projectile, they would have to be immediately in front of my vehicle as it slams into whatever it hit. My body is likely the least of their problems in that scenario.

Unfortunately, no :-( in crashes it's common for the person with a seatbelt to be killed by the body of the person without the seatbelt flying across inside the car like a cannonball. Bodies tend not to fly straight forward except for perfect head on collisions, and even in those cases the person sitting behind you without a seatbelt is going to kill you as they go through your seat. If you're alone in the vehicle I can maybe buy the argument that it doesn't matter, but even then there's plenty of examples of people being literally ejected out of the car and into harms way.

[_heimdall]

That's a fair point, a person without a seat belt may be more of a danger to other occupants of the same vehicle than they are of those outside the vehicle. We don't have seat belt laws that only apply for vehicles with multiple occupants though, and unless I'm mistaken some states only require seat belt use in the front.

[teh64]

1. What if you hit a barrier? They are literally designed so that a person behind the barrier does not get hit, but normally they are lower than the car, so you would still hit them.

2. Proving my point that it is not a victimless crime.

3. What is this lower hanging fruit? Putting on a seatbelt seems very simple.

4. No, this is not your body as a projectile hitting someone, but you being unrestrained prevents you from staying seated and so can't brake or steer effectively. This can even happen even when do not hit something, but just hydroplane or skid.

[_heimdall]

1. Yeah that's a good example when it could happen. I expect that is rare enough that it would reasonably fall to insurance rather than regulation. We simply can't regulate every small chance event that could impact others.

2. Victimless here matters in context of regulation. It seems reasonable to consider someone emotionally harmed is a victim, though its important to decide whether emotional harm felt by one is a direct action caused by the other. For example, if someone emotionally responds to seeing my dead body I didn't directly force that reaction on them and I wouldn't say there is direct responsibility for it.

3. We aren't talking about the act of wearing seat belts, everyone should choose to because it is easy. We're talking about regulation and government authority. Regulating sugary drinks, for example, would almost certainly be more impactful.

4. Brakes aren't the problem if the vehicle stopped quickly enough to make me a projectile.

And to be clear, I to wear a seat belt and want everyone to choose to. I just don't want a government to have the authority to require it and fine us if we don't do it.

[TheOtherHobbes]

This is why no one can trust libertarians to analyse risks rationally.

You're "not sure how that would happen" but there are decades of studies showing exactly how it does happen, who the victims are, and what the quantified risks.

The primary risk is to other people inside the car, then side ejections. Front ejections are a footnote.

You decided only the last of those is a problem without considering the other possibilities.

When considered as a whole, the evidence is absolutely clear that set belts save lives.

It's the same story with vaccinations and other mandates. "I don't like being told what to do" turns into "Well, obviously, the real problem is..."

The people die unnecessarily in large numbers - far larger than if the measure really did cause mass harm.

[_heimdall]

But how frequent are those events? I'm happy to be wrong, I just never saw it as a likely or common occurrence and for me it falls below the level of risk with which I want to empower the government to regulate it.

[toss1]

Add also the cost of healthcare when you do NOT die but are only severely injured.

You cannot have any honest libertarian lifestyle à la carte.

I'd be OK with libertarians opting out — but to be true they must opt out of EVERYTHING. You want to smoke, drink raw milk, and not take your vaccines? Fine, you can organize your own self-insured healthcare too. And you go to the back of the queue and not get treated when a participating member of society has a health issue.

The problem is those "free" "do my own research" types feel no responsibility for maintaining the wellness of their neighbors or even themselves, but DO still show up at the emergency room and expect full medical treatment when the DO get sick/injured from raw milk, no vaccines, no seatbelts, or whatever.

They are not libertarians, they are freeloaders, lying to themselves about libertarian "philosophy" to justify freeloading on the systems and herd immunity built and maintained by their smarter and more conscientious peers.

[_heimdall]

I said this in a sibling comment, but when do we begin regulating other personal choices in the name of shared health care costs?

I see the problem there as being a society wholely dependent on a risk sharing insurance scheme, not any one particular factor that can raise rates.

Edit: its also worth noting that health insurance, and all insurance in the US unless I'm mistaken, is something you choose to use. You don't have to have health insurance at all, meaning you are choosing to take on the risk that others' decisions impact your rates and decided that is worth the benefits you gain from the coverage.

[czl]

> You don't have to have health insurance at all,

There are (or were) tax time penalties for failing to have healthcare coverage. Possible USA laws have changed recently.

[_heimdall]

I'm not sure if those were ever enforced, but I could be wrong. More importantly though, I disagree strongly with that rule when they either tried to, or did, implement and enforce it with the ACA.

[toss1]

>>when do we begin regulating other personal choices in the name of shared health care costs?

It Is Easy:

When those measures have been repeatedly and massively proven to be safe and effective to prevent both individual and especially mass illness, death, and costs.

When you can count the dead by the millions in the graveyards before the measures were taken, and cannot fine one in a million even plausibly "injured" by those measures that literally save society. Pasteurization and vaccination are two examples that come to mind.

Have you ever visited a pre-1900 graveyard? The majority of graves are children. Children who died from the same diseases that are easily prevented by vaccines. Any parent back then would have praised God for the miracle of vaccines. The TYPICAL family had close to a dozen children and was lucky if two survived to adulthood. Same for Pasteurization.

Even raising the question (nevermind twice) shows a deep ignorance of the subject, but a clear willingness to spew ignorant 'takes'. Yikes.

EVERY modern society is effectively built on risk-sharing and specialization. It is also built on cooperation. You don't get to be free to be a complete asshat, or malingantly ignorant and still enjoy the benefits of society. Get over it or go enjoy some remote corner of Siberia.

[_heimdall]

This opens up of a very deep can of worms that can't reasonably be discussed in a forum like this. You have to define safe and effective, and unless its 100% of both you have to find some "good enough" line for people to agree with and that is quite often the sticking point.

[toss1]

No, unless you can not count, it is entirely reasonable to discuss even in short-form forums like this.

For a modern complex civilized society to continue to exist, everyone must make accommodations.

Demanding absolute perfection and zero issues with those accomodations, as you are doing by handwaving about "define" and "100%", is what is unreasonable.

When the lives saved are in the billions, enough to cause a population explosion fundamentally change the structure of society such that e.g., women no longer need to have a dozen kids to have one or two children make it to adulthood, and the safety is so good it takes massive studies to even identify possible marginal issues in one in several million vaccinated, and the consequences of not requiring simple accommodations like taking a vaccine (w/obvious medical bona-fide exceptions) or quarantining to prevent a pandemic or outbreak of a deadly disease, there is no reasonable debate. It is reasonable to require such things to participate in the society.

The people refusing are simply freeloading on the herd immunity and healthcare system built and maintained by their smarter and more conscientious peers.