My wife and I have four little nieces and two little nephews–four of car seat size and weight–a condition not likely to change for several years. We are delighted to have them, and frequently pick them up here, drive them there, and have them in our home while their parents work.
What is not delightful are the damned car seats which take up an enormous amount of space in my wife’s vehicle. Yes, that’s the price of caring for small children, but we bought the vehicle to enjoy its features and lines, and car seats don’t let us do that. Besides, safety nazis are annoying.
Somehow, Americans managed to procreate and raise children to adulthood without the innumerable and growing state and federal regulations designed to protect us from ourselves, and why not? Americans obviously can’t be trusted with liberty. They must be benevolently guided by “experts,” people who know much better than they do what’s good and necessary for them. Besides, who could possibly object to car seats? The expert’s intentions are surely good, and because they’re experts, they can foresee and account for every possible possibility, right? Right? Um, not so much:
“Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”
Well, that’s outrageous, particularly since Vice President Vance agrees with it. It’s common knowledge the replacement birth rate for any society is 2.1 births per woman. That’s replacement, not population growth. In America, that rate is only about 1.62 births per woman. This might be considered something of a problem, whose solution is not importing millions of people with few if any productive skills and little or no understanding of English or American customs, people who will be a drag on the resources of the brokest nation in history.
Car seat laws originally focused only on very small children, but bureaucrats and legislators, who love to tell Americans what they can and can’t do, have vastly expanded those mandates:
The older and larger the child is, the less significant are the benefits of additional child-safety restraints. Yet, many state governments now mandate that children as old as seven may not legally use the vehicle-provided seat belts. Some states require the child be eight years old. This is a sizable inflation of government mandates from earlier (pre-1980) laws that focused primarily on very small children.
Yet, some critics of Vance’s comments would have us believe that the costs associated with these mandates have no effect at all on a decision to have additional children. This may seem credible to wealthier commentators or dual-income-no-kids (DINK) couples who know nothing about the real-world constraints experienced by working-class or middle-income parents.
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Graphic: Car Seat. Author.
Notice the car seat in my Ford Maverick, a vehicle with plenty of room for three children in the back seat, unless one adds a car seat. The only solution for families that would like to have two, and particularly three or more, children is to buy bigger vehicles. A Ford Explorer starts at $40,000, which means a reasonably equipped one will be pushing $50,000. An Expedition starts at $62,000, and one won’t be able to get into a decently equipped model for less than around $75,000. Comparable vehicles from other manufacturers are no cheaper.
Not a lot of young Americans starting families can afford those sorts of vehicles, which means they’re not going to have the children they’d like to have. The lesson is simple: well-intentioned bureaucrats and legislators—I’m giving them a benefit of the doubt they may not deserve—don’t let reality get in their way. There are always unintended consequences of their mandates because they don’t bother to imagine such things. After all, their policies are perfect and can’t possibly have negative consequences.
Those are precisely the people and policies that have the worst, and most damaging unintended consequences.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
