You may be comfortable relying on the usual emergency room cost-to-society argument, but ignoring the intangibles sets you atop an exceedingly slippery slope, ISTM. One can just as easily defend government interventions of almost every ilk, from mandating exercise classes and turning supermarkets into gov't permitted health food stores, or randomly inspecting the contents of your larder (for the children!), to establishing legal penalties for sex without condoms (even the Department of Education has their own SWAT teams for no-knock raids these days!) or setting the speed limit so low that driving those hot cars just makes guys look ridiculous and irresponsible.
The list of ways that bureaucratic regulators and putatively credentialed experts would like to shape your behaviour in the name of our common welfare defy enumeration, and a whole lot of folks are all for it (especially when it comes to taxing sin!) till their own pet oxen get gored. Unless you're willing to extend the emergency room metric to its logical extremes, however, it might be well worth developing both more exacting particulars and less exclusively cost based parameters, while you still have the chance. Extrapolating generalized social harm is child's play, and I, for one, do not welcome our actuarial overlords!
That's certainly true, and it's a good point. There are many individual choices that people make that impose costs of some sort or another on others, from the choices about what we eat to the choices to go skydiving or water skiing. It is not possible, or desirable, to regulate every aspect of people's behavior, even if we save lives by doing it.
So that's a given, and I grant that point.
I don't think it applies to seatbelt or helmet laws. All the things you mention--choices about exercise, choices about food, choices about sex--are different from choices about motorcycle helmets in one important respect.
You do not have a right to ride a motorcycle on a public street.
Nobody has that right. It is not a right to operate any sort of motor vehicle on any public street. If you do operate a motor vehicle on a public street, you do so because you have been granted permission to do so, not because you have a right to do it.
You have a right to make choices about the people you have sex with, the food you eat, and the exercise you do. You have the right to operate a motorcycle on property you own, or on private property with the owner's permission. In those choices, the law can't touch you. Even the most stringent helmet and seat belt laws are null and void the instant you are on private property.
But on public property you have no right to drive. You have a privilege to drive, and that privilege is limited and can be revoked. You operate a motorcycle on public property only in the way that the limited, revokable permission says you can. Your permission to operate a vehicle is already constrained; you are permitted to do so only at certain speeds, only on certain kinds of registered vehicles, only in certain directions on certain roads, and so on, and so on.
If you believe that helmet laws violate some fundamental "rights," then by exactly the same reasoning, speed limits, traffic control devices, licensing and registration requirements, and so on are all violations of those same "rights" for exactly the same reasons.
But the entire issue of "rights" is misplaced. We are not talking about rights. You do not have a right to drive your motorcycle on the road with no helmet for the very simple reason that
you do not have the right to drive your motorcycle on the road at all.
It seems to be a art of the American social character that we assume we have the right to do just about anything we please, and to see everything we do--including our use of public property--as some sort of basic human right, when the reality is nothing like that at all.
