In an interview with ESPN from a year ago, it's easy to spot Roethlisberger's frustration with the protectionist-slanted questions.
ESPN: How do you view that you are putting your employment at risk?
Roethlisberger: It's tough. It's kind of like we say: "Let those who ride decide." I can make a decision. I'm a man. You're not going to make a decision for me, especially if you're not my boss or my employer. You don't have the right to make that decision for me, so I'm gonna go out and be as careful as I can … look how many people are killed in car accidents every day. Its risk whatever you do....
Roethlisberger: There's a lot of people that ride that people don't know about, it's amazing.
ESPN: Why? What do you mean by that?
Roethlisberger: … (John) Elway rode his whole career. (Troy) Aikman. All those guys. They still ride theirs. I bet I'd have to say over 75 percent of the league people ride motorcycles.
ESPN: What would people have thought if they did know that John Elway rode a motorcycle?
Roethlisberger: I have no idea. I don't what would people think. You know … I just know people they make a big fuss like Kellen and I are the first guys ever to ride motorcycles you know I think that's just silly.
ESPN: Can you understand that there is a focus on the risk factor?
Roethlisberger: Yes, but there is a risk in everything you do. (In) everyday life, there is a risk no matter what you are doing. And yeah, there is a risk if I'm out there doing wheelies on a motorcycle. But I'm being the safest rider I can be.
Requiring helmets on public roads seems fine to me. There are safety standards for cars, aren't there? Anyway, no motorcyclist truly appreciates the risk, because human beings just aren't good at appreciating risk. I doubt many even know the numbers that are available, let alone the degree to which their personal routes and riding habits might place their personal odds away from the mean. If you want to engage in a likely lethal pastime, why don't you invent one? Even if it catches on, it'll take awhile to for Congress to catch up, so long as you don't harm others or offer it for sale. Motorcyclists who love the free market can expect more comfortable helmets technologies to emerge as more people are required to wear helmets.
ReplyDeleteNote that even mountain climbers have to register a lot of places so there's a reasonable chance they'd be noticed missing and be rescued if something goes wrong. Are you opposed to that?
ReplyDeleteIf "odds away from the mean" are our primary consideration, where does that leave us? Should we wear helmets when going up long flights of stairs? In the shower? There is no zero-risk environment. If Roethlisberger, a healthy, ox-strong adult, wants to stick his neck out, why not let him?
ReplyDeleteI think society can be perfectly consistent and say, "Look, if you want to cycle without a helmet, good for you, you big manly man. But don't expect us to cover your losses. Pay more for insurance, face total liability in the event of an accident, and play through the pain. It's only your noggin that's endangered."
Also, mountain climbers register for more than just the event that they go missing. The government wants to know environmental impact, frequency of land use, etc., since it maintains roads and trails to the summit. The fees, as the sign says, hold the system together.
Stairs have hand rails and often have anti-slip surfaces as well. Probably required by law in many contexts, and not only because minors use the stairs, I bet. Hotel bathtubs have rubber mats. Yes, this entirely about the activity in question carrying risk above some norm. A bipedal lifestyle becomes riskier in the context of wet stairs and tubs if we don't have the special anti-slip surfaces.
ReplyDelete1. Can you somehow demonstrate that those safety features wouldn't be there in the absence of a mandate? (We'll exclude the ADA from consideration, since it's a separate matter.)
ReplyDelete2. Wouldn't the threat of torts be enough to convince liable owners of establishments to make their stairs safe?
What's wrong with having redundant systems--the private litigation in the courts plus law making in Congress--to foster safety measures? Tort certainly isn't surefire. With tort reform on line, litigating a lot of claims may become economically impractical for poor and middle-class people. Have you read Fast Food Nation? Immigrant workers are being maimed constantly by unsafe work conditions. Perhaps that's a regulatory enforcement issue, since corporations have been a lot freer to ignore safety provisions since Reagan detoothed the agencies and put industry people in charge of them. Anyway, before Upton Sinclair wrote the Jungle, I bet there were no such provisions, and apparently litigation wasn't doing anything either. How did coal mines get safety provisions? Not by litigation, I bet. Work safety, like health care, seems like just the sort of thing to take to your representatives in Congress and get addressed. i.e. were the system functioning well. Because Congress is busy and has to prioritize, I agree there's a tantalizing prospect of economic efficiency to relying on court awards of damages directly to victims to incentivize a viable degree of safety, but safety is darn important, and the courts are very far from perfect. Problems are slow to fix, in the meantime you get variable payouts to different victims, some victims getting nothing, and you get executives deciding to invest in defense counsel instead of safety, not to mention deciding to consider payouts a cost of doing business and a better bottom-line strategy than imposing costly safety measures.
ReplyDeleteWould you rather have "danger pay"--employers paying a premium for jobs more likely to kill you or end your ability to work--or would you rather that employers outfit and educate employees and tailor their specific assignments to the human capacities of their workers for doing them with low risk? Do we outfit our soldiers with Kevlar vests or pay them more? Or train them to be careful? We do the mix, because even regarding the viability of businesses, this is life and death, and we haven't quite figured out the trick. The dismal science, as the economists call it.
ReplyDeleteTeach you not to pick a fight with somebody who buys electrons by the cable.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteWhoops, wrong blog.
ReplyDeleteGeez, I guess. (Nice beetle, there.)
ReplyDeleteI'm not trying to extend this to cover all laws everywhere--there is a limit to my libertarian impulses. I can see the reasonableness in many labor regulations, and certainly we must consider the plight of the powerless and protect those who need protecting. But do motorcycle riders sans helmets fit that description?
You originally said, "Anyway, no motorcyclist truly appreciates the risk, because human beings just aren't good at appreciating risk." Yet motorcyclists have to obtain a special license and thereby learn about them. I would say presumption cuts the other way--motorcycle riders would be uniquely qualified to appreciate the risks involved.
Information doesn't imply appreciation. Even if licensees had all the statistics available to the transportation experts and the legislators hearing testimony from all quarters, still they wouldn't necessarily appreciate it. People often don't translate numbers into rational choices, because probability and risk are famously counterintuitive. I'm not an absolutist about government imposing standards where the safety of large numbers of people is concerned, but I don't see a good reason for making an exception to that reasonable principle so motorcyclists don't have to wear helmets on public roads. Maybe if the anti-helmet crowd registered for non-profit status as a religion, the chief commandment of which was to permit the wind to flow through your hair whenever you're on a motorbike, or else suffer eternal torment.
ReplyDeleteIf your working principle is potentially harms "large numbers of people," what is "large?" What is the baseline for harm? Physical pain? Injury? Psychological trauma? Death?
ReplyDeleteI need to know--because in the 15-year period from 1980 to 1995, 1318 Americans were killed by lightning strikes, and I'm considering legislation to mandate that all citizens wear lightning rods when outdoors.
I'm also going to ban drinking, which I figure will save over 100,000 lives per annum.
ReplyDeleteI said "large numbers" just to predispose the choice toward government intervention, but I don't see any fixed line, and neither do our courts traditionally. This is a classic balancing situation. That's the thing about "goods": They're not all cleanly delineated and independent , and you can't always gets as much as you want of one without diminishing another. Chocolate mousse and a hot body are good examples. We don't infringe on individual liberty to decide how much mousse to eat, but we do regarding cocaine, and we've started to regulate where you can smoke. (I'm for legalizing drugs, but that's just because I think socioeconomically we're more likely to reduce abuse that way, or anyway it's worth a try.) We're not consistent and never have been (remember those folks who counted for only 3/5 of a person down south?). But not only is everything life not nicely divided into absolute categories, not everybody divides things up the same, so if democracy is our goal, we can't expect consistency. The Constitution doesn't explicitly provide many rights, and so we all have to do what the guys in the black robes tell us, alas. Anyway, I think it's a "good" to have governmentally enforced safety regulations, and you seem to too, just not for motorcycle helmets. In principle that result is consistent with what sensible courts courts in different jurisdictions would conclude. But in the jurisdiction where the judge disagrees with me, I'd expect the judge to name what "good" he or she has judged heavier than saving the life of motorcylists who crash, which I judged a clear winner. Your choice makes no sense to me, except in a New Hampshire "Don't Tread on Me" sense. But "Don't Tread on Me" is not in the Constitution, and the United States is not a government by bumper sticker. That is, excepting the office of the president lately.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the "presumption of liberty" is a nonsensical position, even if it's unpopular in today's big-government environment.
ReplyDeleteClaiming that we ought to trust the government's judgment is a dangerous presumption the other way. Why not just welcome oppression, legislative or judicial?
Do you take the same line on the "right to privacy," especially regarding sexual freedom and reproductive choice?
It's not just about saving lives, by the way. Ben Roethlisberger isn't dead. He's scraped up and will require plastic surgery, but that's called "learning from experience."
We are the government, at least in theory ("By the people, for the people," etc).
ReplyDeleteWhat sex regulation did you have in mind? I'd love to see prostitution legalized and regulated. I understand the instinct to rely on a presumption of liberty and where it comes from, I just don't think it tells us what to do in any given instance. It's principle that has more practical use in the Senate than in the Supreme Court, I think. Anyway, it wasn't what I personally had a craving for this evening.