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According to the federal government, the latest dire threat to your life and limb is...a cell phone.
No, this warning does not concern the bogus science that purports to claim a causal link between cell phone usage and brain cancers. (The same kind of nonsense dressed up in jargon claims that various cancers result from living near power lines.) This time, some members in Congress want to pass a national law forbidding you from holding your phone while you converse with friends, family, or business associates while tooling down the byways of America.
(Hmm. I don't remember reading anything regarding prohibition of cell phones in the enumerated powers granted to Congress by the United States Constitution.... Oh, yeah. I forgot. Politicians use that precious document for toilet paper these days.)
Generous souls that they are, our national leaders intend to let us use our property -- for now -- as long as the phone is set up as a speaker phone.
(To be up front, I'm no great fan of cell phones. Too frequently, those who have them plastered to their ears are the same folks in monster SUV's who ride three inches from my bumper while they try to go twenty-miles-an-hour faster than I am. Plus, I find vacuous chatter and gossip less than uplifting. Do such people really have such urgent and important things to say that they need to whip out the cell phone before they even exit their driveways? But, I'll defend their right to etc. etc.)
If facts mattered a whit to those whose sole existence revolves around how much in society they can make verboten, they would examine the research that shows cell phones in cars rank low on any list of activities contributing significantly to accidents. Shaving, putting on make-up, eating, drinking, yelling/slapping at the kids, putting in a new CD or cassette, changing the radio station, and scores of other behaviors all create their own hazards for drivers and their hapless fellow travelers on today's streets and highways.
"Distracted driving" is how such problems are coming to be described. It is and can be a serious concern. When you're hurtling down an interstate at seventy or eighty miles-an-hour guiding a massive hunk of steel, plastic, and chrome amidst hundreds of other such vehicles, you would be well-advised to maintain full focus on the task at hand. Most of the time we can operate just fine on automatic pilot, i.e., habitual behavior, when driving. However, if something unexpected pops up in the environment, the odds of properly handling the vehicle to avoid the peril are vastly increased if our mental processing capacity is not cluttered with irrelevancies.
Such practical issues are, however, irrelevant when considering the passage of new restrictions.
Demanding that every instance of behavior X be outlawed because certain individuals abuse behavior X is a violation of basic justice. Unfortunately but not unexpectedly, such a bass-ackwards "principle" forms the foundation for a vast majority of laws now on the books.
In the old Soviet Union, a prisoner was, in essence, assumed to be guilty. The "burden of proof" fell upon the defendant to prove his innocence rather than upon the prosecution to prove his guilt. By way of contrast, in the United States, the burden of proof has traditionally been upon the State. To adopt the model of the Soviet Union is to commit a basic logical fallacy, an "appeal to ignorance" (argumentum ad ignorantiam).
(This fallacy occurs whenever someone claims that X is true because it cannot be or has not been proven false.)
As David Kelley says in his book, The Art of Reasoning, "To assert that someone is guilty is to make a positive claim: that he committed a certain act.... A defendant is on trial only because he has been charged with a crime, so those who brought charges have the initial burden of backing them up." (First edition, 1988, p. 129.)
Since many of us could not prove we were not at a certain place at a particular time, the Soviet prosecutors enjoyed an enviable rate of success.
Laws prohibiting the use of cell phones by everyone fall into this same category. The authorities are implicitly assuming that you and every other person who might use a cell phone are or would endanger others via your actions. While there is nothing improper per se in having a law against "distracted driving," laws that punish the innocent (and not just those who actually harm others) commit the fallacy of an appeal to ignorance.
Any restrictions that create what is known as a "prior restraint" also follow this pattern of legislative abuse. Censoring a newspaper because the publisher might print a defamatory story; punishing someone because they might commit sexual abuse; arresting someone because he might use his guns to commit a crime; all are exercises in "prior restraint." (All these violations of justice have occurred at one time or another.)
Some might argue that we need to be "proactive" in such situations because of the potential dangers posed by certain parties. But to entertain such notions is to unwittingly endorse a crucial pillar of a police state. That the State already has the power to violate the tenets of justice in this manner in so many instances merely illustrates the distance down that shadowed road we have already come.
Asset forfeiture is one of the most egregious examples of this. The State does not even have to charge you with a crime -- let alone convict you of one -- in order to seize your car, your cash, or your house. (Such laws also are rooted in the erroneous idea that objects are somehow capable of committing crimes.)
Environmental controls and business regulations assume that citizens and entrepreneurs will pollute or harm others unless actively restrained.
The tens-of-thousands of anti-self-defense laws that restrict or outlaw firearms, stun guns, knives, brass knuckles, explosives, and other such tools assume that without such laws we would all run amuck committing murder and mayhem.
Zoning laws and building codes assume that without Big Brother scrutinizing every step of a construction project we would endanger ourselves or others through our incompetence.
To be clear here, if a person did pollute your property; if he did use a gun to rob you; if he did endanger you or your property as he built his home or business; if he did assault you or defame you or cause an accident while chatting away on a cell phone, then such behavior should be punished.
But to presume that each and every individual who engages in a certain action or uses a certain tool would commit a crime without State intervention is an example of that fallacious appeal to ignorance and presumed guilt. Our politicians and law enforcement organizations should devote themselves solely to dealing with actions that are initiations of force and/or which are improper for anyone to engage in (e.g., rape, robbery, theft, slavery, etc.). If they limited themselves to correcting such aberrations, they would be busy enough.
To concoct bizarre what-if scenarios to justify restrictions on otherwise peaceful behavior merely cements the swelling power of the government. The resultant laws also treat the citizens -- from whom, supposedly, our officials derive their powers -- as naughty children who are not to be trusted with the simple act of living their lives.
