Consistent Politics
Politics often presents interesting contradictions. For example on one hand you have people who in one breath criticize the American government over its foreign and economic policy, yet in the very next trust the same government when it comes to legislation they agree with. Someone who might believe that “Bush Lied People Died” will in the same breath trust their candidate for president on legislation that he backs. This came up in this thread at DelawarePolitics.net concerning the possibility of speed cameras on Delaware’s highways.
One could ask why then I trusted the US government to invade Iraq yet don’t trust it when it comes to operating speed cameras. Isn’t that hypocritical? I believe that it’s important to make one’s ethics consistent – but ethics and politics really don’t lend themselves to consistency in the real world.
For example I claim to be both pro-life and pro-choice when it comes to abortion. I believe that abortion is murder but I believe that all murders are not equal. Consequently a doctor performing one is not as evil as someone killing a child. Ditto a husband murdering his terminally ill wife to end her suffering when compared to a woman who shotguns her husband in his sleep. All of these are examples of murder but they are not equal.
Laws are blunt instruments. They don’t recognize the differences between an abortion done by a woman who made a mistake one night and another who simply thinks it’s cheaper and easier to have the occasional abortion than take the Pill. N0t in the eyes of the law though. Similarly there is a difference between the speeding a commuter does on her way to work to get a parking spot close to her office and the speeding a middle-age guy with a BMW Z4 does. In the latter case a cop who pulls both over can decide for herself which case merits the warning and which the ticket.
A traffic camera cannot. It tickets both offenders equally and does nothing to reduce the bluntness of the law on the accused. Worse, there is proof from the Federal Highway Administration and a recent study by the University of South Florida College of Public Health that red light cameras don’t make intersections safer – contradicting similar studies done by Insurance Institute of Highway Safety and other other pro-camera organizations.
Leave a comment