The modern 24 hours news cycle is pretty good at deluging us with bizarre attempts from around the world to enforce the law and encourage social compliance but this one still surprised me. Someone in the UK apparently thought it was a good idea to have local schoolchildren lecture drivers so they have “chance to hear directly what the children think of speeding drivers.” For christ’s sake can’t they at least pretend to have put serious thought into this program instead of going with a feel good solution?

I mean presumably the only reason anyone might (honestly) support such a program is because they thought that deaths and injuries caused by speeding were a serious social harm and lectures would increase overall welfare by being a more effective deterrent. But if you really thought speeding was that big a harm go raise the fines or impose jail time on speeders. In fact it’s far from clear that speeding is even a net harm since the revenue contributes to society while allowing those who gain the most from speeding pay in to society for a small indulgence. It’s downright silly to think that this new program would provide such greater deterrence per unit of suffering to justify trading the revenue from tickets for the expense of having children give lectures. Somehow I doubt they gathered even the smallest smidgen of evidence about this or even thought about it. Nor, I suspect, did they even consider whether the greater attention people pay while speeding (gotta look out for cops) compensates for the increased danger of faster driving.

What really bugs me about this program though is the underlying dishonesty, underhanded social pressure and the dangerous cultural tendency is represents. Just bringing in children to confront a speeder is like pulling out a cute puppy during a political debate and saying, “your plan will kill little munchkins.” Having the children deliver the lecture is downright disgusting. This program doesn’t tell speeders “what the children think” of them. That’s absurd. If they primed the children with stories about race cars and fast driving instead of how bad speeding is they would say something entirely different. These children are being used as mouthpieces to deliver moral lectures that couldn’t stand on their own two feet. You can resent the police man for being an idiot or blowing up speeding into something more than it is but it’s not the children’s fault so you can’t resent them and you surely can’t point out to them that cost-benefit analysis really doesn’t support their position. Frankly, I think it’s despicable to hide behind children so people can’t respond to your moralizing bullshit.

But sure if we have to go this way: won’t someone think of the children? Isn’t anyone worried about underhanded emotional tricks being held up to our children as the right way to confront those who disagree? What about the effect of substituting feel good emotional appeals for real cost-benefit analysis? Shouldn’t we be teaching them the virtues of an objective evenhanded justice system that enforces the law rather than moral prejudices? This case might be harmless and silly but this is the same kind of thinking that causes the unjustified exaggeration of anti-smoking laws, laws against fatty food not to mention attempts to legally persecute the overweight as well as our stupidly moralistic rules about sexual content and intoxicating substances. If out society is going to remain free we need to do more than mechanically enforce certain legal guarantees; we need to cultivate the attitude that the law is an impartial means of punishing people who break the rules not a means of perpetuating your moral preferences on others.