There is very little that the federal government does that could be described as good – in the leave-us-alone sense – but every now and then there’s a small deviation from the pattern. One such nugget of corn in the turd pile is the effort led by Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden in the House and Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy (in the Senate) to eliminate mandatory helmet laws.
The initial focus is on Washington, DC – the federal seat – where is it illegal for motorcycle riders to ride sans a helmet. The end goal is to use the power of the federal government to get ride of mandatory helmet laws in every state that currently has them, which is a majority of them. This is really good news – if you are someone who thinks the government (whether state or federal or local) has as much right to say people have to wear helmets as it does ordering people to wear “masks.”
The underlying busybody-ism is as un-American as dog-eating. Americans – the kind that once made up America – didn’t mind other people’s business. Americans used to think if someone else wanted to ride a motorcycle – with or without a helmet – it was the business of the person who wanted to ride the motorcycle, not theirs. Maybe they thought (to themselves) that it was foolish and they wouldn’t do it, but they were smart enough to understand that if they stuck their nose in that dude’s business then maybe that dude (and other dudes, not to mention dudettes) would be emboldened to shove their noses in their business.
Lots of Americans were too god-damned stupid to not understand this and that is why we no longer live in America, except in name only. We now live in an America in which your business is everyone else’s business and thus, the government’s business – because it requires government force to impose busybody-ness on other people’s business.
It is like a crab pot now. No wonder everyone’s irritable. T
The whole thing’s also absurdly arbitrary.
If people who ride motorcycles ought to be forced to wear helmets – and punished if they don’t – then why should they be allowed to ride motorcycles at all, since they are inherently less “safe” than being inside the steel-and-air-bag-equipped cocoon of a modern car? Helmet or not, even a relatively minor wreck on a bike is much more likely to result in serious injury to the rider. Ergo, it ought to be illegal to ride a motorcycle at all – on the same basis that busybodies rely on to argue for helmet laws.
The only reason why motorcycle riding is still allowed is because it preceded buysbody-ism enforced by the government. If motorcycles were a new invention, riding them would never be allowed at all. Just as what Trump calls “Tiny Cars” are not allowed at all. The latter are deemed “unsafe” (and on that account, are illegal to sell or drive) because they are very small and very light and so not acceptably crashworthy, in the eyes of the government. Well, the typical bike weighs around 400-500 pounds and offers zero crash protection. But the government says you’re allowed to ride one – provided you wear a helmet. This is imposed solely to spoil the ride. With a helmet on, you can’t feel the wind in your face and you can’t easily talk with your girlfriend, either. It renders the ride a novocaine’d experience, muffled and muted.
That’s why they do it.
They say, of course, it’s because “safety.” Bullshit. Just stop it. If it were about “safety” then – at the least – riders would be required to wear armored leathers, gloves and boots. There are no such requirements. You can legally ride a bike wearing shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops. So long as you have the got-damned helmet on. If you wreck, your face will look nice in the casket – or the wheelchair.
So just stop it already. Helmet laws are fundamentally about punishing motorcycle riders. It is a thing pushed by people who do not like motorcycles and the freedom they represent. Speaking of such people.
A busybody named Eric Teoh, who is the head of the insurance mafia’s propaganda arm – the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s statistical services – says forcing motorcycle riders to wear helmets is “one of the most effective, common-sense rules of the road for improving motorcycle safety.”
Don’t you just love how these busybodies talk about “rules of the road” – as if we were kindergartners and they our scolding schoolmarms. Look at this little worm – and roll it around in your head that he has the power – via the government – to punish you for not doing what he says.
How about “societal costs”? Well, how about them? Getting killed on a bike “costs society” less than getting crippled for life on one, doesn’t it? Besides which, this “costs society” crap assumes two things. One, that there will actually be costs. I’ve been riding for decades and have cost “society” not a god-damned cent. The same is true for most riders. Two, the only way I or other riders can “cost” other people anything is if the government forces other people to pay the costs. How about we agree to stop doing that? Maybe we agree to pay our own costs? It’s a wild concept, I realize – Americans having been marinated in socialism for at least 100 years now, which means no one now living can recall a time when America wasn’t socialized.
These “societal costs” are also grotesquely arbitrary. Almost no one argues that fatties ought to be punished by the state for eating too much, even though fatties “cost society” far more than the relative handful of motorcycle riders who wreck and get hurt and use the government to get others to pay for their costs. There are a lot more fatties than riders, too. So let’s pass some Fatty Laws that empower cops to issue tickets to every fatty they see eating (or buying) something that contributes to fatness.
I’m for leaving the fatties – and everyone else – alone who isn’t harming me or anyone else by whatever it is they’re doing or not doing. Leave other people alone. MYOB. This is the gist of the Ride Freedom Act proposed by Van Orden and Sheehy.
It’s a gleaming piece of corn in an otherwise unappetizing pile of shit.
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