Must Have Been A Beer or 12 Involved

twodownzero wrote:

Those of you who advocate completely ignoring door stickers and deliberately overloading trucks far beyond what the people who designed the trucks intended them to carry are reckless, not "free thinkers" who refuse to surrender your liberty to "attorneys literature." Those who support this kind of recklessness are just creating ammo for the future nanny-staters who will, one day, successfully lobby government for severe restrictions on RVs and their drivers--of all kinds--who have for decades lived in a gray area of the law because the use is non-commercial. Openly discussing this sort of dangerous activity and admitting that you're doing it deliberately under the guise of some kind of "personal responsibility" calculus just makes it worse.

I did get that the original posts were kidding about some things and laughing at their own juvenile folly in others. I, too, grew up in a time where cars did not have seatbelts or child seats, and you could jam 5 kids into the back of a vw bug :).

But I also agree that the idea that this is 'personal responsibility' is, as my sainted mother would say, 'a crock of $%#@'

People who take risks with their own lives, and the lives of their kids and the strangers driving down the highway behind them usually drop all talk of 'personal responsibility' once they get hurt. Then they suddenly expect their insurance and social security to pay for their lifelong medical care, even though the expense is far more than they ever paid into the pool. Suddenly WE are all paying for THEM.

Now, I am a liberal hippy treehugger bleeding heart socialist, and I believe in spreading out risk and expense, providing for the common defense, and supporting the general welfare. But I also believe that REAL 'personal responsibility' means making an effort not to be burden on society unnecessarily.

/rant