Nanny State - "Click it or Ticket"

I apprehensively take keyboard in hand to ask if the use of highly-trained peace officers to ensure seat belt use is the best option. I'm apprehensive because I know that one of my regular readers is a Deputy Sheriff Sergeant and another is the wife of a Deputy Sheriff officer in Salt Lake County.

So hear me out before you reply in all caps ...

This isn't about cops. It is about legislators and their values, and their need to impose those values on all the people they rule, er, I mean serve. (Freudian slip, I'm sure.) And more importantly, their lack of real break-through thinking.

To set the record straight, I wear my seat belt religiously. It is a well ingrained habit. You see, I grew up in the "Nanny State" with the highest level of sophistication and development ever. No, it was not Communist Russia, or Communist China, or even Socialist Europe - it was a US Military Base. I literally cut my teeth on socialized medicine.

And there were laws, rules and regulations stacked on rules and regulations. The most restrictive speed limits, and don't think of sitting on a motorcycle without a helmet, long pants and closed toe shoes. And seat belts will be worn, and often at the front gate as you entered this world apart, after dark, the "two-striper" on the gate would stop you and shine a light into the car to ascertain that each passenger was in a fastened belt prior to driving down that 25 mile an hour thoroughfare that was the equivalent of Main Street USA.

I know that millions of dollars are spent on injuries that could have been avoided "if only they would have used the seat belts that were standard equipment on the vehicle." And I'm always a bit uncomfortable at where the line between personal freedom ends and the protection of others begins.

So why am I concerned. Well, because I know for a fact that our biggest highway problems have more to do with drowsy and/or drunk drivers, and while the officers do a pretty good job arresting them, the courts do a very poor job prosecuting and punishing them - and they get back out there way too easily.

Our legislature, which can't get the drinking - driving thing right, decided to protect the rest of us with seat belts. And to further burden our overworked peace officers because they are the Nanny State - and that is what they do.

I'm betting there is a market-driven solution that would have been more effective - oh, and cost effective. (I can think of two all by myself and I only occasionally have an intelligent thought.) But a market-driven solution would require some imagination, and frankly, Nanny States have zero imagination. They invented the box out of which none of us can seem to think.