subject: Government Takeover Just Doesn't Work [print this page] We Need Fewer Laws And Smaller Government
by Michael D. Hume, M.S.
If you outlaw texting and driving, only outlaws will text and drive. And they won't do it well, apparently.
In some places (including one of my home states, California), laws have been enacted which make it illegal to send text messages while you drive, Of course, texting while driving is dangerous, people shouldn't do it, and it causes the highways to be less safe when people do. But a new study by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety shows that, where these laws have been enacted, traffic accidents due to text/driving have not decreased, and in some cases have actually increased.
Increased?
I predicted this. I was driving down the road the other day and thought of a text message I wanted to send, but decided (of course) to wait until I got to my destination. That got me thinking... I bet, I said to myself, that people still send text messages while they drive, but they hold the phone down in their laps instead of higher-up, where someone might see them doing it (and where they meanwhile might be able to at least peripherally see the road). You watch, I predicted to myself, they will find out this well-intended law actually makes the problem they tried to solve worse. You watch, I self-ranted, this will be another example of how government over-regulation of our daily lives brings unintended consequences that were predictable, avoidable, and pretty-much deplorable.
I'm not advocating text/driving. It's dangerous. Before it was against the law, people did it, they had accidents, and some people even died. I am, however, suggesting that there are better ways to attack such a problem than to make a law against it. And this new study proves I'm right. If even one more person died in a traffic fatality because of this law, it's too many.
This is just one example of what your government does to make driving more hazardous to your health in America. Fuel-efficiency standards mean cars have to be lighter and smaller, and that makes them much less safe. You don't even want to look up how much more likely you are to die in a crash in a smaller, lighter car than our parents were when they drove those bigger, heavier cruisers... and all to battle human-caused "global warming," a politicized theory that turns out to have no real scientific evidence to support it.
And now that the government and its sycophantic labor-union leaders have control of much of the U.S. auto industry, it'll be some time before anything can be done to free the market to correct itself.
You could spend hours pondering the unintended consequences of just about everything our current government has done "for" us, from health care reform which experts say will actually ruin the greatest medical care system in the history of the world, to the economic reform that, far from ending government bailouts and takeovers, analysts warn will actually institutionalize them. You could make yourself crazy thinking about it. You could email people, write articles, blog about it, even send text messages about it.
