Seriously – the overly-cautious “nanny state” we all live in is beyond belief. From mandating what safety seats we must use – to the face diapers everyone spits on. Has to stop sooner rather than later.
It began with safety seats
by Eric Peters
The government requires that all kids – almost teenagers – be tied down like furniture every time they are transported in a car. This wasn’t always the case.
Why has it become the case?
Answering that question requires asking the question: What business is it of the government – of other people with various titles – to decree such things? Do these other people own your children? Do they own you? They are implicitly asserting at least partial parental oversight authority.
Where did they get this authority?
Did you, the parent, give it to them? If you did not, how is it that these other people have come to wield it over you?
It is said – by some – that it is “unsafe” for kids to be in cars without being in saaaaaaafety seats. And yet hundreds of millions of them – almost everyone who achieved adulthood before the early 1990s, before the government-mandated child (almost teenager) “safety” seats for all – grew up not being strapped into them without suffering any injury at all.
Some did, of course. Some also tripped and fell. Others fell harder. Some drowned. A few also died from various things, some of them possibly avoidable.
So there is a degree of risk. As with everything in life. We all face risk every day, to varying degrees. That is not at issue. What is at issue is who gets to decide which risks – and to what degree – are acceptable.
There is a degree of risk that attends strapping a child into a “safety” seat that is strapped into a subcompact car . . . relative to one that is strapped into a full-size truck. The subcompact is not as “safe” to be in – hypothetically, if there is a crash – than being inside the full-size truck if it crashes.
Yet it is perfectly legal to drive a child around in an “unsafe” – relatively/hypothetically speaking – small car, so long as the child is strapped down.
But why should it be so?
According to the logic of the Safety Cult – full-size trucks ought to be mandatory, too. It is no less arbitrarily hysterical – or tyrannical – an idea than forcing child safety seats on all. Or forcing hundreds of millions of healthy people to wear a Face Diaper on the assertion of risk to a handful of hypothetical old and sick people (“granny” being abstract as well as her putative death a potential.)
The core tenet of the Safety Cult is that risk of any kind – as defined by them – is unacceptable and must be ameliorated, regardless of the imposition or the expense on us.
This demented principle first percolated up when adult seat belts were made mandatory standard equipment in new cars back in the ’60s. Adults were no longer permitted to decide for themselves whether they wished to buy seat belts.
It followed – logically enough – that adults were soon forced to wear them. The principle having been oleaginously established – because it was never formally stated much less voted upon – that the government ought to be in the parenting business, it became inevitable it would be elaborated to encompass the children of the parents being parented.
They would be made to spend their childhood strapped down – with their biological donors . . . er, parents . . . footing the bill for the equipment mandated by the actual parents in government.
Which is not a small expense – nor risk-free, either.
Child “safety” seats are expensive – in part because one isn’t enough.
As the child grows, he outgrows the seat – something which never happens with the seat that was built into the car. The parent is obliged – by law – to buy several seats per child over the course of the children’s growing up. Some states put a gun to the parents’ head – this is not metaphorical – until the child (whether it is in fact their child, other than biologically speaking) is almost a teenager.
Thus hundreds if not thousands of dollars over that period for “safety” seats, which money might have been put toward more necessary things like food for the child or the roof over its head or the clothes on its back. Put away a couple of hundred bucks every few years and you’ll have a nice little stack at the end of 10-12 years or so.
An actual benefit vs. the cost of an asserted risk.
There is also the risk imposed as a result of the imposition.
“Safety” seats aren’t risk free – because nothing is free of risk. A child might be trapped in a “safety” seat and die, being unable to release the catches himself. Perhaps the parent is incapacitated or dead. Perhaps there is no one on the scene in time to free the child – who would have been able to free himself had he not been strapped in the seat.
Is the risk of that low? Perhaps so. But it is no less hypothetical than the risk of riding beside mom or dad in the passenger or back seat, not strapped down like a piece of furniture in a moving van.
Just like the WuFlu, 99-plus percent of kids did not die as a result.
And what of the risk to the child’s mental health of being strapped down like an animal – or a prisoner? People who grew up before the Safety Cult got its clutches on the American mind grew up free in body and so in mind. They did not learn to fear . . . everything.
As kids are being taught to fear everything today.
The thing to question, then, is the effrontery of the government – those other people who think they own you as well as your children – imposing their risk-reward valuations upon you and your family, whether in the form of seat belts for you or child “safety” seats for your kids or a Face Diaper for all of our faces.
We are at the Face Diaper stage – and dangerously close to the Quackcine/tracking/cashless society stage – because we allowed the prior stages. But having allowed an outrage once does not mean allowing it forever. Ownership over ourselves can be re-asserted at any time.
All we have to do is do it.
