Skipjack wrote:The Presence or Lack of Insurance does not affect the probability that anyone will be hurt.
No but it affects their right to justice and compensation when they get hurt anyway.
You just aren't getting the legal principle of "Before the fact."
The legal system in this country has vehemently opposed every attempt to accuse or pre-judge a criminal act "before the fact."
In simple terms, you have to commit a crime (or tort) before you can be accused (or punished) for a crime.(or tort)
Skipjack wrote:
Again, I find this whole way of thinking very, very bothering, if not disturbing. This comes from a people that have no problem with more and more personal right violations and personal inconvenience AND unnecessary additional cost and maybe even economic problems caused by the increased security measures and other nonsense that we have to endure since 9/11.
Hold the phone jack! (Phone jack. He he
)Plenty of people had problems with it. I have bitched about the ridiculously excessive security to everyone I personally know ever since they started this crap.
Most of the reason for having to put up with this crap goes right back to that "Before the fact" thinking that the courts employ. You see, we could simply ban anyone that looks Arabic, or comes from an Arabic country. The problem is, we are assuming that certain people will commit terrorist acts "before the fact."
As I have been continuously telling you, the law will not allow you to assume someone is going to commit a criminal (or negligent) act "before the fact." (Meaning, before they actually do it.)
Skipjack wrote:
Because that is all for "your own savety". But then they want to let everyone drive a car without a license even though more than 40,000 people get killed that way every fracking year. That is more than ten times as many as were killed in 9/11 and that only happened once and not every goddamn year.
This demonstrates another point I mentioned before. The court system does not give a tinker's d@mn about the unintended consequences of their decisions. If a supreme court decisions results in tens of thousands of people getting killed, (which could have happened had forced busing and desegregation gotten out of hand) they will simply say. "Oh well. At least we're legally consistent. "
The courts do not care about quantity (of cases) , or consequence. They care about adhering to their legal philosophy.
In any case, I think the court cases discovered by MSimon have pretty much made this discussion academic. Unless there is some other legal principle involved that I'm not aware of, and unless there are other cases which go in the other direction, (difficult to conceive of because of the principle involved.) I'm pretty sure the mandatory insurance law cannot survive a serious court challenge.
Probably the only reason it hasn't had one is because the people with money to hire a lawyer, like the law, and the poor people whom it affect the most are both ignorant that they can challenge it, and unable to accrue the funding necessary to bring the challenge.
Whoever ends up successfully challenging this mandatory insurance law is going to be very badly hated by the majority of people who like the idea of reducing their financial risk at the cost of poor people loosing their right to travel.