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) ssssssssaaaaaaaafety 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 saaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety 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 saaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety 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 saaaaaaaafety 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 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.
Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety seats aren’t risk free – because nothing is free of risk. A child might be trapped in a saaaaaaaafety seat and die, being unable to release the catches himself. Perhaps the parent is incapacitated or dead. Perhaps there is no one on 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 saaaaaaaaaafety 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.
. . .
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Eric,
You might be proud to know, that since I’ve become a bit addicted to your site and often speak of it, I even have my girlfriend saying “saaaaaaaafety” and mocking the Saaafety Cult.
THat made my da, BaDnOn – thank you!~
I still have fond memories of riding with my friends on the station wagon tailgate of whichever parent was driving us to/from a little league game. The taller kids could let their feet drag on the ground and we all got to do that on every bump in the road. Probably get a SWAT team called out on anyone doing that today.
Hi Mike,
You’ve “triggered” the same (great) memories in my head, too! We did exactly the same and – somehow – no one dieeeeeed. How did it happen that neurotic busybodyism took over the country?
same problem with airbags. Everyone outside the government gave a thumbs down to the idea but the feds decided you MUST be saved. If you won’t wear your seat belt (which is what started it) we’ll create a child and small adult killing machine and mandate all cars and light trucks have them.
In point of fact if you wear a three-point seat belt you don’t need the stupid airbags.
My sister and I rode many many miles on the back of a 1971 C20 chevy truck I was usually setting on a cub cadet on the way to mow grannies yard ,don`t know how we survived.
I had a 1978 Ford station wagon for work and for play. It was a great car.
You have to work, everything you do is work. Writing music is work, breathing is work, everything in this world of woe consists of work. You gotta pay attention, at all times.
DeLaval developed a volunteer milking system, VMS, the milk cow walks into the milking robot and the robot milks the cow dry. Been around for a while now.
In California, near Blythe, Saudi Arabia owns 13 thousand acres of land to grow alfalfa using Colorado River water, the alfalfa is shipped to Saudi Arabia to feed milk cows. Saudi Arabia owns land in Arizona and Argentina. Location, location, location.
Many ways to skin a cat, if you can ship California alfalfa to Saudi Arabia, then you can afford to ship pellets of scrub forest from the Carolinas to the Drax facility in England.
This is the 21st century, you gotta get with the program and be a 21st Century Schizoid Man.
I wish I still had that Ford land yacht. har
We have this horrible nanny-esque organization where I live called Partnership for a Healthier Johnson County. They actually put forth the idea that it’s child abuse to purchase a used car seat. Apparently, it’s like a motorcycle helmet. One wreck and it’s no longer good, or so they say. I thought “good luck with that.” We have diverse income levels here and a lot of German heritage, so you’re just not getting people to buy a brand new seat every couple of years instead of paying rent or getting smokes, especially when they saw one at a garage sale for $10.
Partnership wanted an ordinance, banning the sale of used seats. Fortunately, our commissioners are somewhat libertarian and told them to bugger off. (They also won’t do Partnership’s other pet project, a countywide no smoking ordinance.)
The local hospital is one of the partners in the Partnership. If someone has a baby there, they actually hold the child hostage until one of the parents shows them a car seat. You can’t just walk out of the hospital with your baby. They wheelchair mom to the entrance and whoever is driving her home has to pull the car up and let them look inside and see the baby go in the seat.
Hi Amy,
This parenting of parents is insufferable; I marvel so many accept it. The fact that so many do accept it explains the acceptance of the Face Diaper. At least I’ve not heard that song about how “free” America is in a while.
Which brought to light a memory from 1973. I was young, too young to be in the situation, as was my wife. She had delivered our son a day or two ago. I came by the hospital after work, and she told me the doctor was sending her home. My son was in the room as well, so I told her to get dressed, and let’s go. She did, and we did. On the way out a nurse told us we couldn’t leave yet. I gave here a grunt and a smirk, and out the door we went.
The medical system is just one more arm of the leviathan many armed beast. I stay as far way as humanly possible from it. To not avoid such a satanic system is really just asking for it.
Not lobbied for by insurance companies to minimize exposure to risk. Like those hideous battering ram bumpers that wound up costing more in repairs than they saved.
Hi Eric,
Excellent article as usual. Some of the videos you link to in your articles are real gems! I had never seen that guy before but he was great.
When I was a kid, single digits back in the days (90s), always sat in the front seat
Im not gonna put my kids in the retard seats once they’re beyond toddlers, and they can sit in front with me all the time, cause screw saaaafety, i want them to be car fanatics like me
The safety cult and those pushing it go way way back in the automotive world. Remember even in the earliest days of the automobile they prohibitive speed limits and red flag laws and other nonsense?
But back then they could be fought back against. Even on the corporate level. We won’t see films like this from GM today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1m0AOMzdzA
Remember when safety was better handling and brakes?
yes i’ve probably posted this before.
Hate SO MUCH the smug look on the witch wearing the diaper with her two poor kids.
Ditto. Fortunately, I experienced a wonderful counterpoint today. At my regular Tuesday trip to Aldi, I ran into a young woman, probably in her mid-20s, with her two kids who appeared to be about 2 and 4 years old. All of them were undiapered. I stopped to chat with her for a few minutes and was treated to great statements, such as “It’s all ridiculous”, and “I won’t go into any store that wants me to put a mask on my kids”. I told the kids, who were very well behaved, that they had a really good Mom and went away feeling just a little bit of hope.
LOL-you needed to hear a child with her mom,both masked,outside in a parking lot upon seeing US that won’t wear a mask-tell her mommie how we’re gonna DIE. wth are they telling the children ?
and of course,as kids we were jammed into the back seat,adults up front, who were smoking,if they wanted to,using incredible language when cut off LOL -many illegitimate SOBs back then & then someother species LOL etc and gee, we survived second hand smoke w/o asthmatics /bronchitis among us,good language,learned good driving skills /defensive etc.
i miss those days,they were damn good.
Based on my experiences as a homeschooling mom, my sad belief is that most parents have been trained into tyranny, and are a bit too lazy or submissive or conformist, or just innately bossy themselves, to overcome that.
My kids were unschooled (no assignments, no curriculum, no carrots or sticks – and no regrets, either). Most of our friends were homeschoolers, many of them purportedly unschooling (those who stuck to a strict curriculum tended to see my family as a bad influence). I assume these were at the lenient end of the parenting spectrum. Nonetheless, the moms would impose pointless restrictions on their kids, “for your own good” and “because we love you”. They seemed to welcome the support of gov’t mandates, which lent their own strictures more (apparent) legitimacy. One woman made her daughters ride in the back seat even though the elder one was larger than the mom. None of them questioned safety seats, just as almost all of them insisted their child keep a jacket on when he or she was complaining of being too warm. Some women accused me of child abuse, merely because I let my children make up their own minds about Santa Claus (whom they learned about from their buddies, not from me).
The importance and ubiquity of arbitrary rules in schools, and the need there to ‘go along to get along,’ are beautifully explained by former NY state teacher of the year (twice), John Taylor Gatto in his highly recommended books. Alice Miller’s ‘The Drama of the Gifted Child’ is useful, too. One has a much better chance of overcoming indoctrination if one can scrutinize its methods.
I’m almost sixty, and in retrospect I can see that even in my childhood, schooling was designed to Dumb Us Down, and I know things have gotten much worse. I thought school was great back then, only because I was extremely shy and loved to read and learn. Now it’s horrifying to recognize the effect schooling has had on my diapered peers. But there’s no excuse for not growing out of it.
Hi Penny,
I totally agree with your post. I am a homeschooling (unschooler) mom of young teenagers and I never understood the curriculum based, sit in a class for 8 hours, approach to kids learning. Kids are constantly learning and asking questions. It is up to parents to introduce that knowledge to their kids. I thought my kids history through field trips. I felt that they learned more being somewhere (Jamestown Settlement, Yorktown, Civil War battlefields, Presidential estates, etc.) then I could teach them from a book sitting at the kitchen table. Math was taught shopping at the grocery store, English through classic literature and book reports, and Science from being out in nature, whether on the Chesapeake Bay, at a farm, at a zoo, in the woods, etc.
The world is a constant learning experience and does not require a desk and a chair.
I am a parent of 4 children, ages 6-4-2-1, and the only one we put in a seat is the 1 year-old. This is OUR choice, not done because da gubment says so. I have the training and experience, as well as UNDERSTANDING, so I actively operate my vehicle – as opposed to having the vehicle/computer, traffic controls, and other vehicles make all the decisions. My children are buckled when we decide, and also are unbuckled with their hair blowing in the wind out the windows or sunroof when we decide. Fear is not an option, especially with our world today, and the rapidly coming collapse/conflicts we will all experience here in our home country. K7C
Plus it’s much harder to reach for your weapons when strapped to a seat. I’m sure the boys in Iraq and Afghanistan are all properly strapped in as per government policy when out in injun country…
I applaud your thinking, your children will grow up to understand that there is a risk in everything we do and these risks are worth taking. Unfortunately the government has now past punitive laws requiring the use of seat restraints in many if not all states. We are a risk adverse society and a litigious one also. Many of these changes we are witnessing I believe are due to our fears of being sued, not getting hurt. Just look at the modern playground equipment out there in comparison to the stuff we played on as kids. Somebody got injured and sued a manufacture, and now you have plastic slides and padded swing supports and rubber mulch in the place of go old black top. I think the fear of being sued is fueling many of these changes, not safety concerns alone.
Every great once in a while I let my kids ride in the back of the pickup. I did it as a kid and I’ll be damned if I’m going to deprive my kids of that joyous experience.
The path of least resistance is to just strap the kid down and be done with it. How far are you willing to go to fight the system? Do you have infinite wealth and time? Because the state does. They’ll drag out your struggle for decades, long after the kid has outgrown the child seat phase, all the while lawyers will bleed you dry and you’ll still probably lose.
We brought this on ourselves. There used to be a saying “You can’t fight city hall.” This should have been taken as a warning that because the state effectively has the right to destroy individuals, any legislation should be implemented only after extremely careful deliberation. But with the age of the Progressive upon us that idea went out the window. But it turns out if you burn enough of the city and vote in a bunch of milquetoast micromanagers and appeasers you can get city hall to fight your enemies.
Yeah, right on. I’d like to add more to your thoughts — as individuals we can’t resist the state, maybe for a little while, but sooner or later, the state wins. This is because as a population of people, we can’t all JUST be individuals doing our own thing. It sounds nice, everyone just ‘live and let live’, but the world doesn’t work that way, it’s a fact — a law of physics that we can’t change… someone or group is going to try to take our stuff and our freedom away, so the ONLY way for us to retain our freedom is to BECOME the state. We have to be a collective of people that have some kind of rules so that we can all get along, and we have to figure out how to KEEP those rules/civil rights from being violated — IOW we can’t let dictators take over.
But, I suppose some people will reject my point here, and they’ll be triggered by the word “collective” since it has a bad reputation nowadays from being used wrongfully and in bad contexts but they won’t have read my text for meaning, and they’ll reject the idea of a population of people actually being able to have a say (vote) in their own lives & rules/laws even though that’s exactly what they always say they want. IOW alot of people are very confused.
Problem is, the utopia you imagine was tried here in Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.” What you end up with is what you see today. Mob rule micromanaging your life, including grave infringements on your natural rights.
I’ve spent a dozen years arguing the anarcho-capitalism/minarchism divide in my head. Ultimately, I think I now agree with those from posterity, like John Adams, and others from the current day that a freedom/liberty mindset, culture if you will, taught primarily in a home setting from birth is the only possible way to achieve liberty oriented governance, irrespective of form, in society. Also, widespread practicing of agorism will go a long way to mitigate anti-liberty societal pressures.
“Where did they get this authority?”
The same place every crime syndicate gets it’s authority. At the end of a club, or a gun, coupled with the threat of being tossed into a concrete box or killed if you don’t comply.
Hell who am I kidding they’ve got 95.% of them mind controlled into total slavery.
Let the remnant rise up!
There is no system that, no matter how steeped it is in liberty, will not become oppressive. none. The only defense is to keep each political subdivision as small as possible. Need a good old fashioned secession every couple of years.
Another Jeffersonian heard from. Secession is a tactic, not a defense against oppression. If California seceded from the US tomorrow, it would continue to be a profoundly anti-liberty oriented place. Furthermore, secession taken to its logical conclusion, down to the individual, results in anarchy, an unlikely if not impossible state of affairs in a society of alphas and betas.
There’s more than one person on this planet, so we all HAVE to get along — that’s a law of physics, not an option. Culture isn’t going to suffice for rules, sorry, but that doesn’t work. We already tried that and today’s America is what you got. What I’m talking about is not a utopia, it’s the very simple way of people getting along — they talk to each other and decide on a compromise… the entire country should run just like 5 people are living in the same house — it’s basically the same method. But I guess it’s so hard to accept that society itself is really alot simpler than we all are used to thinking of it — we tend to think it’s very complicated, but it’s not really.
Hi Harry,
Of course we have to get along – but isn’t cooperation preferable to coercion? You cite the example of several people living together in a house. But is anyone forced to live in the house? Did they agree to share it voluntarily? Are the people free to leave, if it becomes not to their liking?
This is nothing like “majority rule” – in which the individual is forced to obey what a majority (which is often a minority in fact) decrees and punished with violence if he resists or disobeys.
It baffles me that people think force is the way to secure liberty.
Harry- I get it now. Laws of physics=“science” so you must be correct! Where have I heard that before? LOL. Anyway, I find it unbelievable that you think that the current culture in the US, or even that of the last 50 or even 100 years, is or has been freedom/liberty oriented. Also, I never said culture was a substitute for “rules”, rather it is a precondition of necessary governance, irrespective of form, that is respectful of freedom/liberty.
Okay okay, I’m not disagreeing with you, that’s what’s kind of confusing here… hmm, maybe if I asked what yours (& others) idea of how the world should work, then that would help me to understand what you’re saying. I’m just saying, we all can’t have everything we want — sometimes we have to compromise, … so we as a population vote on stuff. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying we should vote to take anyones’ rights away though, no way, I’m just saying we should vote on regular stuff, for example if I wanted a superhighway to be built through my neighborhood but noone else did, then we all vote, and I lose. But the vast majority of the voters should win, not me, because I’m the minority.
“According to the logic of the Safety Cult – full-size trucks ought to be mandatory, too.”
Something changed in the Sixties: a notion developed that the federal government could and should pre-empt state laws for a “good cause” (never mind that silly piece of paper called the ‘constitution’).
The Highway Safety Act of 1966 required that “each state must have a highway safety program approved by the [Secretary of Commerce] . . . in accordance with uniform standards to be approved by the Secretary.”
And off we went.
The head-smacking insanity comes in when one recalls that President Johnson, who signed this legislation, at the same time was escalating a war in faraway Vietnam which ultimately cost the lives of 50,000 US soldiers.
Government … don’t it just kill you?
States are welcome to ignore the guidelines and do their own thing. But they don’t get any money. That shouldn’t be an issue and it wasn’t up until the passage of the 16th and 18th amendments. Once the “temporary” increases in the income tax (to pay for the war) were put in effect the states lost the ability to raise their own funds. The reason is because the average tax rate can’t get much above 30% or people just won’t pay it. We are seeing this first hand in high property tax states and the elimination of the state tax credits on federal income. People who are able are voting with Uhauls. Now tax revenue and unlimited bond issuance is keeping the state governments in clover while making sure they stay in line with the central planners. It will be interesting to see what happens when the “emergency” FED municipal bond purchases will become permanent enough that the states and cities just emulate the congress. Extend and pretend, just like the big boys!
no no no they want us ALL in gas efficient compacts as a truck will get them killed in a collision.
Seeing the pic with all the kids in the station wagon brought a smile to my face. That was how many of us Gen Xers grew up. I spent many a trip to the beach sitting in a station wagon facing out waving to the drivers behind us. My sisters and I would sit in a circle playing Connect 4 or play the license plate game and 2 hours would fly by. I didn’t wear my first seat belt until I was 16 years old. It wasn’t the government who told me to, but my father who threatened to take my car away if he found out I wasn’t wearing one. All of the cars we rode in were boat size. Everybody I knew had a diesel pick up truck (that we rode in the bed of going down the highway) or a Dodge Charger or Buick Oldsmobile. Every vehicle could comfortably sit between 6 to 8 people. These days the 7 seaters are a joke. In my SUV no one taller than 5’ feet can sit in the third row seat.
One of my fondest memories is riding in the third-row flip-up rear seat of a ’70 Dodge Polara wagon, on a church trip, with the grandfather of a friend doing his best Andy Granitelli imitation! Trees go by REALLY fast in that rear seat at 75 MPH! We all seemed to survive the experience. Remember the slightly moldy smell back there, due to little water leaks in the footwell? Kids nowadays need to experience that, and riding in the back of a pick-up, and riding loose in the rear of a wagon without that third row seat. The lack of such experiences is evidence of the depravity of “modern” parenting, and society in general.
Safety seats also expire, after about five years. Metal, plastic, and tightly woven nylon straps (all of which we’d have to recycle if used to contain a beverage, precisely because they don’t degrade) apparently all become unstable and unusable in car seat form after a short time. So you’ll have to buy a new set of seats for child #2, then #3, and so on, in order to be legal and compliant. Add it to your tab.
And then the matter of this very weird recent vintage of rear-facing safety seats until two years of age? How the F do you scrunch a 30 inch long toddler into a seat like that? So their knees can jam into their chin when you brake? And new parents don’t question the wisdom of this?
In Vietnam, it’s just the opposite. Adults are required to wear helmets when operating motorcycles. Children can freely ride along without wearing any protective devices.
Hi Anarchyst –
In Virginia, helmets are mandatory but nothing else, highlighting the arbitrary absurdity of it. I can legally ride a 170 MPH sport bike wearing shorts and a T shirt and flip flops… so long as I am wearing a helmet.
The government does not need to mandate helmets, etc., since one experience with kissing the pavement will make you a believer, or dead…fortunately, my road rashes happened while younger, and at low speed. Try having a nurse pick all the gravel and debris out of your hand following an endo on a minibike, then you WILL wear gloves from then on…and a brain bucket, and boots and long britches.
Hi Crusty,
Many things can hurt – and kill. Smoking, for instance. Obesity, for another. I am not unaware of the risks of riding without gear. I do so because the reward outweighs the risk – in my eyes. Which are the only eyes that matter, as regards myself. I extend the same courtesy to those who smoke, or don’t exercise.
Busybodyism is much more of a threat – and ought to be regarded as such!
Concur. I do not want Uncle telling anyone what attire is appropriate for motorcycle riding…experience and personal prudence will do a far better job than Uncle ever could, with fewer bad side-effects.
Well, Crusty, I’ve been riding nearly daily for around 47 years and can’t say I agree with you there. And I’m a two time member of the Over-the-Bars club. Riding is simply a different experience when wearing a helmet. I’ve got nothing against a guy who wants to wear one, but I do find the “you will…” statements a bit irksome.
I’d rather avoid the accident in the first place. When I’m questioned about not wearing a brain bucket – usually from some woman – I point out that if you really want to ride safe you ride a Volvo. And the nurse I dated a year ago gave up trying to lecture me about traumatic brain injury after I reminded her of my two buds who had smash ups with buckets on. One’s now a quad and the other’s a para. We’re all gonna be dead one day, but we’re not all gonna have to have someone wipe our bums and wheel us in front of the boob tube for decades. Personally I’d gladly choose the former.
You’ve got a different attitude, and that’s fine by me, but don’t believe for an instant that it’s shared by all of us.
PS: I do have a collection of helmets, mostly for timid backwarmers’ use, and a few for my own when conditions call for it, but my dog and I will be climbing on my bike in a bit for a wonderfully free scoot. That’s living!
Ditto, Bill –
I’ve also been riding for decades and many of those sans the helmet – without incident. I agree with you that the “you will” comes across as as strident and lecturing; it implies the speaker knows best and those who don’t hew to the speaker’s point of view are essentially dumbos. I am, like you, well aware of the risks but consider the reward of not riding with a helmet to be well worth the risk, which I judge to be slight as well as hypothetical. After all, I have not been hurt on account of not riding with a helmet on. Maybe I will be. But that’s of a piece with other assertions about what might happen.
I’m proud to say that my kids are growing up in the same way that I did. The older ones–10, 7, 5 all laugh when they see a 9 or 10 year old in a car seat.
It’s gotten so bad that my 7 year old son won’t ride with other people for even 5 minutes because the seat belt is “torture”. My daughters will ride, but tell me about how terrible the belted ride was.
It’s an interesting thing because my kids have come about their attitudes naturally. I didn’t have to say anything about seat belts. Imagine the natural feeling of not wanting to be strapped in and locked down. Who would have thought! Yet, in the sick society we inhabit, I’m the abusive parent, rather than the ridiculous safety cult followers.
P.S. My children also look at the face diapered with astonishment and horror.
Morning, Ancap!
It’s vignettes such as the one you’ve just related which keep me from giving up and running into the Woods. Thank you, sir!
First comment? That’s a first for me.
You mentioned cashless society. Something has been bugging me about that. From reading various web sites, I think we can safely agree that there are powers that be involved in certain vice activities, like drugs and prostitution. And they like to protect their turf, which could explain things like the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. So, if we’re going to go to a cashless society, how exactly is the end user supposed to pay for his fix? An inner city addict isn’t going to walk up to a street dealer and whip out his debit card to buy his stash of heroin or cocaine, that transaction needs to be in cash. Are the powers that be really that short-sighted that they didn’t think of this when planning out a cashless society? Or is this a case that Thomas Sowell would consider a trade-off rather than a solution, that we get to keep our anonymity and they get to keep their drug trade?
Hi Jim,
There are always trade-offs and in this case, the control and power obtained via a cashless system far outweighs any monetary losses. Keep in mind, moreover, that it is precisely cashless that could “solve” the arbitrarily illegal drug/prostitution “problems.”
People will find some other medium to be used as fiat “cash”. I understand that in prisons and county jails, ramen noodles, cigarettes and all kinds of things are used as a means of exchange. Never figured out the ramen noodle thing, but one of my kids is a probation officer (not necessarily proud of that) and he says that’s what they use. No matter what the government decrees, people will find a way to indulge in their vices.
In a rural place in the US I visit frequently, I have seen an increase in bartering.
Barter only works if you have something to offer in exchange. Someone suffering from withdrawal probably only has one thing to offer, their already tortured body.
Barter is an inefficient PITA. It complicates the already fraught negotiating process by introducing more subjective variables. It works with some things, but it is a poor society which has to depend upon it. And savings in anything perishable is pretty much impossible.
Thank you Ernie for some common sense on this topic.
I’m sure part of the Build Back Better™ will be a Chinese style social credit score system, with ever-watching cameras connected to AI systems monitoring your activity. The contact tracing app is the first step in a long ratchet tie down that gets everyone under control of the one party, the party of Biden. At that point a cashless society with transaction logging won’t matter much.
Remember Hill-dog’s interpretation of 1984?
As she puts it in What Happened, “Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism … this is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered. The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust towards exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.” https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hillary-clinton-doesnt-get-george-orwells-nineteen-eighty-four
Trust your leaders because you’re not qualified to make an informed decision. But only if you choose the correct leaders, the ones selected for you. Just look at how wonderfully well it works in China!
It’s not really a “social credit score”, it’s really a rating of how much of a threat to the dictatorship regime you are. LOLOL but they gave it a name that sounds like something nice & good. Textbook mind control.
But hey, they’re the current leaders. There’s no leadership from the people, so the leaders get to do whatever they want. And we in USA won’t have a say in anything either, because we still believe in the dictatorship system, whereby the dictators / leaders will decide everything for us. So we shouldn’t complain about anything at all — this is the system we want, and we got it, and this is how it works, so we should be happy.
some type of black market “cash” would likely evolve
Illicit drugs, untaxed smokes, and prostitution have long been hawked for food stamps, and also use of the EBTs. Never underestimate the cunning of the average ghetto denizen.