Issue: So long as they are aware of the dangers involved, adults should not be legally bound to use seat belts.Write a response in which you discuss your own opinions on the statement. Decide whether you agree or disagree and present a persuasive case wit

Many libertarians are in the habit of questioning state interventions that are made seemingly only in favour of the welfare of those whose freedom is restricted. How does the state know, they ask, whether I am happier eating healthy or unhealthy food? How can the state decide for me that super-size sodas are a treat that should be forbidden? Recently, a special issue has become the focus of these libertarian arguments: compulsive seat-belt laws.

It is important to analyze the two-step argument made by the libertarians closely. The argument goes like this. Firstly, there is no harm done to others if a certain person does not wear seat belts. Drivers who wear no seat belts are not more likely to make accidents, they are - selection effects aside - even less likely due to the increased risk of bodily harm they are exposed to. But, so goes the second step, the state is not justified in intervening purely for the good of the agent whose actions it is restricting. This is generally backed up by the claim that agents are the best judges of what is good for them.

Before we begin analyzing the second-step in the argument which, while dubious in its generality, matches my beliefs in a slightly weakened version, we should take a look at step one. We are told that increasing the risk of injuries for yourself does not lead to a damage to society in excess of the damage that you are responsible for yourself and will have to pay for yourself. This, however, assumes a complete absence of insurance coverage.

Now there is two ways insurance might be organised. In my home country, Germany, people are required to sign up to public medical insurance. This essentially means the state is the one who ends up paying for your injuries - and these costs are far from negligible. Hence, in this special case, it is quite obvious that the state is justified in restricting your freedom - you are threatening to waste scarce resources owned by it.

If insurance is private, the issue is more complicated. You might argue that the higher danger of injury is translated into more expensive insurance premiums for the drivers reckless enough not to wear seat belts. But we face a typical information asymmetry issue here: the insurance company is not able to get any data on whether or not you were wearing a seat belt, or at least acquiring data on this issue would be excessively costly. Hence, the optimal way for the insurer to respond to the decriminalization of driving without seat belts would be to increase insurance premiums for everyone - once more you are responsible for some considerable damage to society. In this case, this damage is not caused by you individually but by the collective of insured drivers not wearing seat-belts - but the effect is the same.

Finally, let us analyze the second step in the argument. I am actually quite sympathetic to the notiont that the state has no business intervening in issues pertaining only to individual welfare. It seems to me like Mill's harm principle is correct: you may only intervene when a person threatens to harm another, but not himself.

On the other hand, there is some recent evidence on the how the argument of the libertarians, while not wrong, is misguided. The central claim that people are the best judges of their own preferences is wrong on most definitions of that term: for instance, people have a strong aversion to postponing the satisfaction of preferences to the future. Hence, they save too little for retirement. It seems to me that this is one example of a case where the state is indeed justified in intervening on behalf of the people whose freedom it is restricting.

There are even evolutionary reasons for why we are consistently wrong in some of our judgements about our preferences: eating fast food is one example of such an ingrained failure of our brains to adapt to the modern age. High fat and high calorie food was important in the environment where humanity matured as a species, an environment where the shadow of scarcity constantly accompanied our ancestors. But this adaptation of our reward system to food that is important in periods of scarcity utterly fails us in our life of excess and abundance.

I am inclined to accept that seat belts are a similar case. Driving was simply not a part of the historical environment of the homo sapiens - and hence we are unable to rationally assess the risks involved in driving without seat belts. If this is so, then our preferences might truly be better served by an intervention due to the government.

In a nutshell, we thus see that the two-step argument that (a) not wearning seat belts does not harm others and (b) people are the best judge of their own preferences fails at both stages. While I feel some sympathy for an attitude generally criticial of government intervention, I do also see that there are some instances where human reward circuitry is wired wrongly and hence produces consistent misjudgements on the parts of individuals that have to be corrected by government intervention.