Posted on 10/12/2007 5:41:50 AM PDT by ShadowDancer
Of course it is idiotic to ride with out a helmet. But that is completely beside the point.
Liberty is the right to choose for yourself and not have government dicate your choices.
Granted that people should make the right choices, but without the opportunity to choose, they have no liberty.
My original post, I admit was somewhat vague, but my complaint is with the fact with $100 payment you can have liberty.
One should not have to pay for liberty otherwise the poor will be excluded.
It makes it easier for the cops to identify the body..............they are so lazy......
“The measure would let riders pay a $100 annual fee to allow them to opt out of wearing a helmet.”
Just incredible!
And Florida is considering the reinstatement of it’s helmet law.
So they make sure that when they leave their brains on the asphalt, they'll put the rest into the ground. Charming.
Thanks for the tasteless goulish joke.
If you're riding without a helmet, my biting wit is the least of your worries.
That's for direct impact. A lot of motorcycle accidents involve glancing blows where a rider's head bounces or slides along the pavement and for those situations a helmet can save your life even at highway speeds. I personally know a rider who was sideswiped at 80km/h; his helmet was destroyed and his collarbone was broken but he did not sustain any kind of head injury.
That being said, I wear a helmet but wouldn't make it mandatory. I would make eye protection mandatory, though, because a rider who's blinded by a bug is a menace to everyone around him.
No helmet is usable after a crash- it's designed to crumple from a single blow.
Oh really? Come to DC or Baltimore and watch the motorcyclists cutting around cars on the Beltways at speeds in excess of 70 MPH and tell me about who's at fault!
Liberty sometimes means the freedom to make the wrong choice.
Pretty funny,huh? Sort of nails the lie that the state does this stuff to protect us, doesn't it? /snigger
Follow the money, follow the money.
And what about the liberty of people who make the right choices, and suffer from the poor choices of others? The liberty of a drunk driver does not outweigh that of the passengers in the car he hits.
The liberty of a helmetless motorcyclist does not outweigh that of the people who will end up paying to keep him on life support, because we as a nation and a people don't just chuck patients out into the street to die.
The vast majority of Americans support at least some roles of government -- and one of those is providing the nice smooth, paved roads that we use to get from A to B. However bad you think your local roads are (mine are pretty good, but I know it varies), read up on the dirt roads in the early Model-T era.
What the government has the power to build, it has the power to regulate. Leaving emotion aside, if you splatter yourself on the highway, that's going to tie up traffic. That's tangible economic loss from workers and shoppers who aren't getting where they want to be and are instead sitting and fuming in their cars. Cars that are idling and contributing to global warming all the while.
One should not have to pay for liberty otherwise the poor will be excluded.
If you can afford a motorcycle, you can afford another $100 to ride without a helmet. If you don't have $100, I have to wonder what kind of POS bike you have and whether it's a menace to the rest of us on the roads.
That fact of life is based on insurance PAYOUTS.
I rode, and I always used a helmet.
You don’t want to wear a helmet? I have no objection.
I have a bigger problem with this catch all argument used to butt into everyone’s life. That being the notion that something [insert cause du jour here] you do costs the [government/taxpayer/society/someone else] so any and all of the above have the right to regulate every aspect of your life.
If you live and breathe you affect others. If we truly want to live in a free society we must accept the fact that freedom of choice comes with costs. Your head injury may cost me (via society) something, but it is also certain that some things I do will also exact something from you (via society).
I had to dodge moronic drivers all the time, but the helmet protection applied regardless of whose fault the accident was. Having the right of way doesn’t do one much good if one is dead.
There is a choice involved.
There is a nanny state issue here.
I've always maintained that anyone who rides a motorcycle without a helmet doesn't have anything worth protecting.
All morotcycle accidents are the fault of the bike rider(not in a legal sense) for being on the road. No matter how much you “educate”, a motorcycle will still be harder to see than a car, people will be in-attentive, and you wil sometimes get mashed. Same thing is true if you go on a public road on a bicycle, walking, or in a little hockey puck car. Not saying don’t do it, not saying you don’t have the right, just saying you’ve got to deal with reality. It’s the old cafeteria plan for life. Take what you want and pay for it.
Sorry, but in my driving experience around here, you aren’t selling me, buster! If it’s the automobile driver’s fault it’s because he’s trying to get out of the way of these jerks on rice-burners showing off.
gee 6 post before the pseduo donorcycle post...what’s taking the A-B-normal brains so long tese days?
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