Not BREAKING: Cops Write Tickets to Save Lives

Apparently they have let us in on this little tidbit as part of the clickity-tickity campaign. For years, many people believed that cops wrote tickets to create revenue for the cities and other governments they work for. Some have noted that basic scheduling and other variables involved in ticketing behavior support that idea. But now, that theory has been blown out of the passenger seat, so to speak. The whole point of stopping a vehicle to write a seatbelt ticket is to save lives. Who’d a thunk it? I know it gives me a much better understanding of the system, now. All is not well, though.

I question the wisdom of this practice of saving unstrapped motorists’ lives. It seems to me that it is ripe for the moral hazard argument. What this means is that cops are basically altruistic, and we know altruism in government is dangerous thing. We learned all that back when we tried the Great Society business. Given this new insight, I would think that if they write a ticket to me for not strapping up, then they are trying to sort of alter my behavior so that I will strap up in the future. If that occurred, then I would be less likely to be smished plumb dead, or just smished all to mush, in the event I drove the automobile into something and came to a sudden stop. If, if, if. If a frog had a hammer...

There's a problem here. I, the unstrapped motorist, have gotten something for nothing. I have had an agent of the government try to help me. Surely, they didn’t do it for the person I might hit with my automobile. It would not be very likely that my seatbelt would save that person’s life. They didn’t do it for my insurance company, either, now, did they? They did it for me. Now, I am hopelessly dependent on the government. Why? Because the government has done something to help me, and I didn’t earn it.

Think of all the money that could be saved if the government were not so generous with handouts to deadbeats like myself. Why do I deserve to have my life saved? Couldn’t the money be better spent on people who deserve to have their lives saved? This is only the moral argument, though. The more practical argument is that government handouts create dependency, and so I am more likely to have to be corrected again in the future. Rather than learning to put my seatbelt on, I’ll just haphazardly cruise on and start depending on the state to tell me that I should have my seatbelt on. And it won’t just destroy my values. It will effect my children, too. Before long, there will be a sort of generational cycle where I sire children who don’t wear seatbelts and depend on law enforcement to be told to buckle up.

These new revelations on the real Big Government reasons for seatbelt tickets demands attention. When are we going to learn our lesson? I think the government should start phasing out this clickity-tickity stuff. People need to learn to put their own seat belts on. I think maybe it would be best to have a "three strikes, you’re out" policy. After you get three tickets for no seatbelt, I say they just tell you that you are ON YOUR OWN. No more tickets for you. You’ve had plenty of opportunities to learn to put you seatbelt on, and if you don’t want to, then you can just get smished. Tough love. That’s what I say.