The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds and die of a heart attack at 43, you can! You are free to do so. To me, that's beautiful. - Ron Swanson
And then we came to the collective realization that—while great in theory—letting people unintentionally suicide themselves through carelessness and neglect imposes costs borne by the rest of society.
What about people that make healthy choices and live long enough to bear cancer a few times, shake off a few other diseases, have hips replaced, collect endless Medicare and SS payments, etc?
The person who blows their heart out at 53 probably costs a whole lot less VS what they put into society.
Sure, your weird struck-by-lightning-57-times strawman might cost more than your average suicide-by-mcdonalds person. But healthy people are more productive and are productive for longer and only a vanishingly small portion of them are ever going to get struck by lightning once, let alone 57 times.
> But healthy people are more productive and are productive for longer
Not nearly as long as they live, sucking up healthcare resources.
"Unhealthy" people like smokers and the obese are more cost-effective, because they're nearly as productive per year and they die before needing the absurdly expensive medical care for old age.
People use the vast majority of their lives medical expenditure in their last year or so of life if they make it to old age. Someone dying in their 50s before they hit the ground coats very little. Saying that I hope everyone lives long healthy lives.
They're not vanishing silently and peacefully into the night, they're killing themselves with chronic poor health. That's the entire problem, they're not dodging it, they're embracing, amplifying, and accelerating it.
The problem isn't that people don't realize the behavioral issue here, it is that "we" can't decide on out to best mitigate the costs. People don't really seem able to address this as absolutists keep dominating the discussions not allowing any progress as that invariably requires compromises they are unwilling to make.
The primary effect of seatbelt laws is fundraising through pointless fines.
And some informed folks have even argued that in modern vehicles airbags are so effective seatbelts could be worsening accident outcomes. (Elon Musk made this point in one of his podcast appearances re: Teslas)
If you want to make this argument, you can at least provide some data on how much some police departments make by collecting seat belt fines, and compare it to other fines and cost of operation. I doubt the seat belt fines are significant enough to warrant this speculation.
The airbag argument is even worse. Modern vehicles go through numerous safety standard tests, including real world experiments where test dummies are put in an actual car crash. If seat belts make the crash worse for the dummy than airbag alone, these tests would have shown it, and there would be publications about it in a peer reviewed science journal. If you are so confident, you should be able to find at least one such publication. I doubt you will.
Having been in a roll over accident, yes air bags saved me from braining myself on the door window (I quite appreciate that side curtain airbag now) but would have done sweet fuck all for keeping me actually in my seat during the events.
