I come from the only state in the U.S. without a seat belt law for adults. The New Hampshire state motto is “Live Free Or Die,” and we certainly live by it. Nobody or nothing is going to oppress us by making us wear seat belts. Now I hear you, Reason Magazine and libertarians everywhere. There are certainly more important laws we could enforce than making adults wear their seat belts. If they want to die in car accidents, that’s their prerogative. After all, they’re the only ones who have an interest, right?
Wrong. Because of the current insurance system. If everybody who got into a car crash and wasn’t wearing a seat belt died, then this problem wouldn’t come up. But happily, many of them don’t. Instead, they go on their merry way to the hospital, having sustained much greater injury most of the time than they would have had they been wearing a seat belt.
If they have insurance, their insurance company will pick up most of the cost of their treatment. The company loses some money on this, because they will spend more at the hospital than they recoup from this one customer’s fees. But the insurance company has lots of other customers who don’t get hurt most of the time, and they make a profit off of these healthy people. The more insurance company money goes to actually pay for health care for people who foolishly risk great injury, the smaller their profit, and the higher their rates for the rest of us.
Which brings me to my suggestion for New Hampshire and the rest of the country. It is silly to keep stupid adults from killing themselves in car accidents because they refuse to wear their seat belts. Don’t mess with the gene pool. Instead, let insurance companies work their system a little. Require people to declare that they don’t wear a seat belt as a prior risk when they apply for insurance and have them pay a little more. And if someone hasn’t disclosed that risk and they get injured in a car accident while not wearing a seat belt, let them pay a fine for undisclosed risk.
The larger point behind this is that greater liberty is usually better for society, but sometimes it may take a little tweaking. In this case, there may be no need to legislate, but changing insurance requirements will keep the stupidity of the few from placing a greater burden on the many.
Libertarianism is best salted with a little utilitarianism if it is actually to be the best system for the greatest number of people. Of course, you’d think die-hard live-free-or-diers would have better things to complain about than being forced to wear seat belts.
In fact, they do assert their freedom in other ways, like refusing to pay for schools. New Hampshire has the lowest tax burden in the nation, which is great in many ways. We tax the heck out of visitors with restaurant and hotel taxes, but we have no sales tax and no income tax. Thus, we have had a terrible time finding a fair way to provide money for schools, because property taxes vary so much between towns.
Students in Bedford, N.H. went to one high school in neighboring Manchester for years, along with all of the Manchester students, even though the school had to be closed for a while because dangerous mold was growing in the ancient ceilings. Bedford residents, largely wealthy retirees, just didn’t want to have to pay for other people’s children to go to school, and it was cheaper for Bedford if they didn’t have their own high school.
Because the legislature will never pass any bill calling for a broadbased tax, every year the governor tries to come up with some alternative way to fund schools. Cigarette tax? Gambling? You name it, we’ve tried it. We’re on slot machines right now. Of course we spend lots of money on schools, and our teachers are only paid slightly less than the national average. But we never know where we’re going to get that money.
The point is, those elderly Bedfordians need to suck it up and pay for a public good. The convenience for them of paying low taxes is probably offset by the dire necessity of public schooling for a thousand teenagers. New Hampshire likes to brag about its low taxes, about how we live free, but really? If your freedom is so important that it trumps education for the youth of your country, you’re just being selfish.
