Helmet laws and Empires

October 19th, 2007

I ride a bicycle around London, and never wear a helmet. I have never worn a helmet in my life to ride either a motorcycle or a bicycle.

Free people do not wear bicycle helmets.

There is a completely ’21st Century British Insanity™’ piece in today’s Times ‘Alpha Mummy’ where a shrieking, hysterical, illogical, fear soaked nincompoop equates cycling with children to, wait for it…. CHILD ABUSE.

I’m not making this up.

After getting up off of the floor, being thrown down by fits of laughter as a man Tased, I read some of the comments and found this site, cyclehelmets.org which is absolutely wonderful.

First of all, no free country has helmet laws. Period.

Helmet laws spring from that same foul well of immoral laws that says you cannot ingest whatever you like, or have consensual sex in whatever way you like in the privacy of your own home – that you have no privacy, that the fruit of your labour does not belong to you, that your children do not belong to you, but to the state. These diseased ideas, that are absolutely un-British are the sort of thing ‘Eleanor Mills’ espouses by extension when she says what she said in that piece.

I will give the devil her due and say that she posed this as a question, but the fact remains that this vile thought, this absurd question actually passed her mind, and she then actually posted it on the internets. Nothing wrong with the latter of course, but honestly…I digress.

This site has the proof that cycle helmets are ineffective as safety devices, and, like the fear pumped safety mania that has spread all over the west, are just another piece of nanny statism that can be proved to be pointless. Not only that, but these useless laws the site argues further diminish the rule of law in general, since the law is plainly seen to be not only an ass, but unreasonably interfering in private matters.

Look at this graph:

The countries with more and safer cycling are where fewest cyclists wear helmets. This is a fact.

In the past, you would have read this piece by Eleanor Mills and then perhaps entered into a debate with someone about cycle helmets and how they, “make people safer”. You would have had to rely on anecdotes and gut feeling to make your point, and you might have been able to win if you were eloquent.

Now with the internets, people like Eleanor Mills can write a piece of garbage and have it shot down within ten minutes of it being published, and furthermore, everyone who knows how to click on a link will be able to trash her aberrant thought.

In conditions like this, liberty is the default result, and now we can see how it is going to happen. Logic, common sense and the facts are now no longer stuck in treacle, and time to delivery of these facts is near instant.

The Ron Paul campaign in a few short months has put complex questions into the public arena, all thanks to the internets:

Message from Ron Paul

The other day, my old sparring partner in so many Congressional committee hearings, Alan Greenspan, was on the Fox Business Channel. After Alan promoted his new book, the reporter asked if we really needed a central bank. Greenspan looked stunned, and then said that was a good question; he actually talked about fiat money vs. a gold standard. Now, the ex-Fed chairman is not about to endorse our sound monetary policy, but you know our Revolution is working when such a question is asked in the mainstream media, and this powerful man gives such an answer.

You and I are reopening a whole host of questions that the establishment thought it had closed off forever: on war, on taxes and spending, on inflation and gold, and on the rule of law and our Constitution.

As China and Japan start ‘an unprecedented flight from the dollar‘ only Ron Paul is talking about the causes and what must be done to stop it. Only Ron Paul comes up the with the numbers showing how much america is spending on running its foul empire – ONE TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.

Helmet laws and empires are inextricably linked. The same urges that drive evil and venal mass murderers to spread plagues of death all over the world are the same ones that make parliaments and legislatures pass helmet laws and all the other illiberal and useless control laws that should all be removed from the statute books.

This is in no way ‘a stretch’; in fact, you can file it under ‘act locally, think globally’.

Your freedom on the local, personal level is essential to maintaining peace and non interference on the global level. When you lose your liberty and mass murderers, international gangsters, counterfeiters and vicious organized crime syndicates engineer it, the bad consequences are not only going to affect you, but your neighbours, your cities your country and the entire world.

FINALLY it is being understood, albeit at the eleventh hour.

2 Responses to “Helmet laws and Empires”

  1. BLOGDIAL » Blog Archive » Libertarians and the Milkcow’s calf blues Says:

    […] Or ride a bicycle or motorcycle without a helmet. The answer is that it’s a bad analogy. When you drive without a seat belt, you are not motivated by a desire to die, or even a desire to take a small risk of dying. Why should your motive matter? Because your death — especially your death in a car crash — does impose externalities on others. I would pay good money not to have to see your bloody carcass lying beside the highway, or endure the traffic jam, or pay the emergency room costs. A serious right like the right to die may be worth the cost, while a right to be careless or irresponsible is not. […]

  2. BLOGDIAL » Blog Archive » Biker Boris: Libertarian or not? Says:

    […] LOSE Boris! There IS NO ‘CASE FOR CYCLE HELMETS’! […]