This year’s State Legislature is on the verge of passing several seemingly benign laws which, if enacted, will impose another set of, albeit well-meaning, regulations on the citizens of, and visitors to New Hampshire. Three of the most hotly debated of these proposals are bills to mandate (1) the use of seat belts by all front-seat passengers in motor vehicles; (2) the use of helmets for all operators and passengers of motorcycles and (3) the wearing of “hunter’s orange” by all hunters, excluding those in pursuit of water fowl.
While the motives of the proposals’ sponsors and supporters are undoubtedly noble, the effect of such laws will be to further, however subtly, erode our fundamental rights of personal freedom and individual choice. Therefore, before this intrusive legislation becomes a reality, it would be prudent to consider the character of our society and the legacy we want to leave our children.
Specifically, what should be the role of government in a free society?
For many men and women who risked everything to settle in American and give birth to our nation, the role of government was to undertake only those limited functions which could not reasonably be performed by individuals. They advocated a government which, by its conscious restraint from action, should preserve the rights of its citizens to determine their own destinies … intervening only when actions from such choices infringed on the rights of others.
Those sage pioneers understood, incumbent in such a philosophy was a recognition not everyone would make wise, or even reasonable, decisions … but that once made, people had the responsibility to live with the consequences of their actions.
During the intervening two centuries our society has inexorably become a paternalistic one. In their unfettered zeal to insulate people from all forms of risk, including those stemming from their own folly, individual rights have been sacrificed. In the process, people have effectively been absolved from having to assume responsibility for the results of their own actions. No where is this latter consequence more evident than in our government where it seems the public is inevitable the looser when bureaucrats, institutions and/or programs fail to perform as advertised.
In the current context, seat belts and helmets clearly save lives and reduce many serious injuries … and only a fool would wander around the state’s woodlands during hunting season without being a brightly attired in a hunter’s orange hat and vest. But it has been education, not governmental edicts, which have ultimately brought about the desired behavioral changes in fighting such public menaces as AIDS, illicit drugs and racial intolerance. A similar strategy is preferable in increasing the compliance with seat belt, helmet and hunter’s orange goals.
Interestingly, these same legislative statists remain conspicuously silent when it comes to such dangers alcohol and tobacco whose direct and indirect annual statewide toll runs to hundreds of deaths and millions of dollars. Then again, booze and butts have already added more than $44,000,000 to the state’s coffers this fiscal year alone!
It is not the government’s role, nor should it be its obligation, to codify individual behavior, which clearly does not infringe on the rights of others, simply because some people deem it appropriate and just plain common sense.
In a nation suffocating under a government which is acknowledged as too big, not to mention too costly and too intrusive, we must protect the inalienable right of our citizens to determine their own destinies whenever and wherever possible … educating and persuading, not mandating and coercing to modify behavior which might be harmful to the individual.
William James perhaps said it best, “It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”
