Sue Cameron wrote "Yes, Mike, it is a personal choice. Some states in our country have laws where motorcyclists must wear helmets, other states don't. It is a personal choice whether or not to wear a helmet. I for one would, because I wouldn't want my brains splattered across the pavement, but there are times that I am driving two blocks to school where I teach and I forget to buckle up. Should I get a $50 ticket for that? I guess so if I choose to disregard a law that was put in place for my safety."
Sue, my view here is that where there are significant economic consequences to your fellow taxpayers and insurance co-poolers, it stops being strictly a personal choice. If Humpty Dumpty is riding a motorcycle without a helmet, skids on an oil slick, slides into a car and splits his (Humpty's a male) head wide open (when a helmet would have prevented the injury), does that mean that the rest of us in society have the "choice" of not performing the 12 hour operation to save his life, not providing him with a month-long hopital stay and the six months in a rehabilitation center followed by a prolonged period of outpatient rehab in order to put Humpty back together again (or, perhaps in a wheel chair for life)? And then, in addition to the personnel resources saved to not have to fix Humpty up, would we also avoid having to watch our auto insurance rates rise, as well, since we did not have to cough up the $2 million in medical bills to fix the problem ? Similar argument with seatbelts, of course. Really this goes to the issue of rights versus privileges (with corresponding responsibilities). I think that a society is on solid ethical grounds when it establishes certain acts (such as riding a motorcycle on public roadways) as being privileges, and sets responsibilities on those who would exercise such privileges. Sue, this is not to skirt the main issues that you raised, that there need to be tradeoffs from time to time among our rights and privileges - when one is threatened, sometimes one of the others must be relaxed or suspended until the former has been secured. I agree with you completely on that. I also agree that there must be a better way than "TIPS" to handle this. As for "believing in American capitalism", while we all agree that it exists as an identifiable system, most of us who broadly support it as the way to go (as opposed to Socialism, for example) do so with the concession that it is the lesser of two evils. Better to try to harness a viable source of economic energy by limiting its excesses that to tinker with an intrinsically impotent method (human nature being what it is). In the early 1980's I spoke with a Russian couple who had emigrated from the USSR to the USA. They told me that the Russians' satiric description of their economic system was "we pretend to work, and the state pretends to pay us". Now if only you could convince all of the people to change their attitude about that........;-) Best regards, Bob S NP - The Last Waltz (which I rented and have now seen for the first - and second - enjoyable time). Joni was almost out of place there, it seemed to me, except that all of the boys wanted to touch her or kiss her - who could blame them? Coyote's a great song, and as usual she does a professional job with her song - even if her perfection was denied somehow once again. Still waiting for Bob Dylan to hit even a single note. Good grief - can't we see he has no clothes on (except for his hat)? ;-)
