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Seat belts. The statistics will tell you, prove to you that it is absolutely safer to wear a seat belt any time you get into a car. Insurance companies tout it, celebrities endorse it, special interests shout it at us at every opportunity. We are force fed this knowledge, screaming at us from the billboards we drive past, bombarding us from the radio and terrorizing us from the TV tirades which tell us of the dire consequences we will suffer if we do not wear one. Ask almost anyone today whether it is better to wear a seat belt and they will automatically respond with an emphatic "yes". We have all been conditioned to this response, have had it beaten into us. It is as if we have all become unwitting dupes in some grand Pavlovian experiment. We have all been fooled.

It would be fruitless to attempt to argue against the safety benefits of wearing a seat belt when traveling in a motor vehicle. It has been proven and is well documented. That debate is over. The facts are all right there, which allow each one of us to make an informed decision of whether or not we should be wearing a seat belt. So when exactly did we, collectively as a nation, forfeit our right to make that decision for ourselves? When did we all say, "We are too unintelligent, too incapable, too inexperienced, just simply too dumb to think for ourselves and we need our all knowing, all seeing, infinitely wise and ever watchful big brother, the government, to make decisions for us." By doing this, by allowing the government to pass laws which say that a police officer can pull anyone over, at any time, interrupt their day, their life, simply because they are not wearing a seat belt, by doing this, we are surrendering our right to personal liberty. We have eroded our freedom that much more, have shifted undeniably closer toward that oppressive and invasive, totalitarian society imagined by George Orwell so many years ago. He was right on the mark with his prediction of the bleak future we are falling headlong into. He simply got the year wrong.

Wearing a seat belt does not improve anyone's driving skills. It does not make a driver less of a hazard to the other drivers on the road. It does not make us more focused or more attentive. In fact, it could be argued that wearing a seat belt is actually a distraction and makes us more of a danger to other drivers. A driver can become preoccupied with adjusting the seat belt because it is uncomfortable, because it is restrictive or even because they

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