>"Of course, we legislate morality. You don't want Christian morality to be legislated ... come up with another source. Let me know what that source is."
I don't want to legislate anything for purely moral reasons because I don't want you or anyone else imposing your morality on me. Why should someone be able to impose their moral values on me any more than their religion?
>"Legislating safety takes away from freedom a little bit each day. In order for something to be illegal it should have a direct and provable correlation to infringing on another's rights. No, we have laws prohibiting anything that *might* infringe on somebody else."
This is just a balancing question. Where do you draw the line between safety and liberty. It is a very difficult issue for people to agree on, but it is the proper way to frame the debate. My point (above) is that as long as there is a safety or infringement factor, it is appropriate to debate whether and how to legislate it. Your point is simply that you don't agree with where our politicians have drawn some of the lines. Fair enough, but you can't please everyone when you are balancing intangible factors and drawing lines.
>"I don't want insurance companies telling me what should be legal or not."
That's an unfair and loaded way of phrasing it. The insurance companies are merely a good measure of the real-world costs of certain activities. One of the most appropriate things for government to legislate (IMHO) is collective action problems -- that is, problems that are in the best interest of everyone, as a group, but no one, individually, with the result that the free market won't correct for it (if you took economics, you will recall the so-called tragedy of the commons; this argument is also probably the best capitalist argument why communism fails). Many enviromnental regulations are good examples of this.
>"I think people vastly over-estimate how much "safety" laws provide. Laws are a means of punishment, not prevention. An officer cannot arrest someone for murder, burglary, rape, etc until the action has already occurred."
People vastly overestimate and vastly underestimate most macro-numbers. The effect is magnified when the consequences of a probability are particularly good or particularly bad. (I recommend the book Innummeracy on this phenomenon.) For example, people overestimate their chances of winning the lottery or dying in a plane crash.
As to your second point, laws are both a means of punishment and prevention. As preventative measures, they are not foolproof, but they probably work better than we realize. For example, I think a lot more people would steal, cheat on their taxes, and drive really fast if there were no penalties.
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What a drag it is getting old. -- Stones