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We forced the seat belt law on people, and the no cell-phone law… In your little world of freedoms, who gets to decide what is made into law?
No cell phones while driving is fine (in concept). That's a law put in place to keep people who drive while on the phone form hurting others. But a required seat belt law? Who does that protect? It only requires people to do something that will only protect themselves. The difference being laws that protect you from me and me from you are one thing, but laws that protect you from you and me from me are wrong.
Actually, his statement includes the rationale I think he used: you "shouldn't force safety on people unless it puts others than the individual at risk."
This is the classic harm principle that you cannot violate someone's freedom for their own good (through law anyway).
I suspect there's a plausible argument that cellphone usage or texting (though difficult to enforce) have some externality of harm where they might increase accidents. Though despite reasonable evidence that it decreases driver attentiveness to talk or text on a phone while driving, I'm not sure that it actually increases accident rates noticeably (or that we could not mitigate this effect with other methods that would be easier to enforce than legal cell phone bans).
I suppose you could make laws requiring seat belt usage for children in cars (classic paternalism, though I disagree with most "car seat laws" which serve to mandate particular car seats or types of car seats with minimally increased, if any, effectiveness for safety at much higher regulatory and potentially monopolistic costs), but otherwise, I don't think that's actually a strong case for an externality of harm. Generally the flying metal or debris of a wreck is more dangerous than a projectile humanoid and the seat belt itself offers a minimal level of protection for the individual against harm themselves such that they should have a strong impulse to use it.
This logic is further exacerbated with helmet laws, where the helmet does not protect other people at all.
Hey if some of the Hells angels bikers wear them then why shouldn't other bikers?