The Nanny State, sort of

It's fun when sports and my political leanings collide. Well, it's fun for me anyhow. You may have heard at some point earlier in the year that a minor league base coach was tragically killed when a line drive struck him in the temple. This development prompted a number of major league base coaches to choose to wear helmets for the rest of the season. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first incident of it's kind in the 100 plus years of professional baseball.

Rather predictably, word came this week that next year, MLB will require all base coaches to wear some form of head protection. The exact form of protection has yet to be determined. I have to say that I think this a gross overreaction, and that there a number of potential dangers that are more significant in baseball that have yet to be addressed, chief among them being pitchers, who are closer to the batter and in a more defenseless position at the time of contact. While I certainly support any base coach who wants to wear the head protection (I'd do it in there place), I think it's an unnecessary mandate. That being said, MLB is a business, these are team employees, and there are liability concerns, so ultimately I don't have a serious objection to the decision.

What prompts me to write this entry is the reaction I've gotten in other forums when expressing my opinion that this is an unnecessary overreaction. It deeply troubles me how many people have accepted as fact the notion that it is the government's job to save us from our own stupidity. Specifically, someone told me without blinking that "Sometimes you have to legislate common sense." "It keeps people safer, so what's the big deal?" I remember the great modern thinker, Jerry Seinfeld, was once known to describe helmet laws, for instances, as "a law whose purpose is to protect a brain that's functioning so poorly, it's not even trying to prevent the cracking of the head it's in." Nanny laws like this are anti-evolutionary. True Darwinists should support the stupid in their efforts to remove themselves from the gene pool, not pass laws to make it more difficult."

On their face, things like helmet laws, seat belt laws, and other laws designed to force me to take precautions to protect my own life seem fairly innocuous. However, they represent a dangerous cessation of our right to make our own decisions about our own life and safety. The government's job is to protect me from you, not to protect me from myself.