

Bill Would Ban Wearing Google Glass While Driving in West Virginia - derpenxyne
http://gizmodo.com/5992133/bill-would-ban-wearing-google-glass-while-driving-in-west-virginia

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brownbat
> I am a libertarian, and government has no business protecting us from
> ourselves, but it does have a duty to make sure I don't injure or kill
> someone else.

This falls in a category of state action where I don't disagree with the
intentions of the bill, but I still think of it as squandering legislative
resources.

It reminds me of a recent debate in a nearby county over whether or not to put
speed cameras in school zones. The argument was that children should be
protected from dangerous driving, which is basically indisputable. Those
opposed pointed out that no children had ever been injured in the county's
school zones, raising concerns that the measure was designed purely for
revenue, when other intersections probably needed better enforcement.

Now, I don't know, maybe the County Commissioner had a kid approaching school
age, and saw someone speed on that road, and made some hasty, biased risk
calculations. I don't know if the chance for "tickets in school zones" money
drove the push.

But I feel like we are generally terrible at catching the "opportunity costs"
of legislation. If W. Va. wants to stop people from killing each other on the
roadways, maybe it shouldn't be looking at Google Glass, but looking to add
structural improvements to its most dangerous intersections, on-ramps, and
exit-ramps. It could prevent deaths next year without making anything else
illegal.

Since a legislature can only solve so many problems in a year, fixing the
imagined "google glass" problem actually means other problems go unsolved.
Because of that, even if they were solving a real problem, it could still
reflect a failure of governance.

The investment analogy would be that it's not enough to just get some return
on investment, your measuring stick is whether or not you make a better return
than you could have for equivalent risk. Mere profit is sometimes a waste of
capital. Legislation that saves one or two lives over the course of the next
20 years, but squanders the opportunity to save hundreds more, should be seen
as essentially responsible for the difference in deaths.

I don't think we've really solved this problem for public action though in any
state, not to mention the national level.

I'd be interested if anyone has a solution. So far all I've got is "only let
actuaries vote," but that might not be the utopian paradise I imagine...

