People should have the right to make dangerous choices.

I claimed that if a person had no right to make dangerous choices, our choices would not be made by an all-seeing benevolent power, but rather by a government bureaucrat who is immune to risk yet will decide what is too risky for you. Con counters with a comparison to parents taking care of their children. That's asserting that Big Brother is indeed like your parents: smarter than you, more knowledgeable, and better to judge what is good for you than you yourself. But that's wrong, unlike your parents, government does not know you at all, and government does not have vastly more experience in what the relevant risks may be to you. It's better compared to child abuse.Con further argues that, "no government is perfect ... the government is still the best placed arbiter for managing our competing wants to restrict certain risks from being taken, and that the government is charged by the citizens of the state to prevent other citizens from being stupid." I think that is equivalent to saying that since parents cannot supervise our whole lives, the best we can do is have government take over the role of parenting. I don't think so. A better alternative is to let people grow up and be responsible for themselves. Con largely ignores my case. The unrefuted points of my case stand:1. Restrictions on dangerous choices are unjust, 2. Progress depends upon taking risk, 3. Government enforces ideology through the guise of risk control.C1. Con argues that "not everyone is an expert." He uses the parenting example, in which parents know many more than small children. I remember watching boys of about 12 surfing on a rocky coast in Hawaii. There were no parents supervising. The waves were not really big, but they moved the surfboards into the rocks at the speed of fast walk. When a lad was about to crash into rocks, he would jump off the board, land neatly on the rocks, and simultaneously picked the board out of the surf. Parents knew it was safe. How would government know? For most kids it would be "dumb," for those kids it was not. A 12 year old does not have a resume showing experience.Con argues that we allow Jackie Chan to leap around on the Eiffel Tower because he is an expert. Stuntmen are in fact not licensed, or given permits, or "allowed." Perhaps the French have rules for their Tower, but in general stuntmen assess their own risks. Chan is frequently injured, saying, "The stunt was simple-just jumping down from a castle wall to a tree below. The first time I tried it, the stunt went perfectly, but I wasn't satisfied with the take. I tried it again, and the second time, I somehow missed the branch I was trying to grab. Whish! I fell past the tree and onto the ground below. ... I hit the rocky ground head first. A piece of my skull cracked and shot up into my brain, and blood poured from my ears. The production team quickly got on the phones to try to find the nearest hospital that could do emergency brain surgery, and eight hours later, I was going under the knife. The operation was successful, and I recovered quickly-even though there's a permanent hole in my head now, with a plastic plug there to keep my brains in." http://www.randomhouse.com...Con argued that it must be that Chan and others were "allowed." They are not. They know the risks and decide to accept them in view of the rewards. So what would Con recommend as the procedure by which some are allowed and others are not?C2. Objective Standards. Con seems to have mistaken my entire point about the use of statistics. My point was not about identifying who is an expert. My point was about identifying what, according to the government, is dangerous. If something is deemed dangerous, then, according to Con, a person should not have a right to do it. The government may or may not allow it, but there is no right to make the dangerous choice. So if 500 people are injured on stairs, then they may be deemed dangerous, and hence subject to government regulation.Con argues that objective standards exist for every activity, by which a person is judged an expert or not. There are none for stuntmen, Con's prime example. There are no such standards for most dangerous sports. There are none for most of the dangerous occupations: fishermen, loggers, or farmers. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com... Some activities are inherently dangerous, without regard to experience. The dangerous occupations are in that category. Government might decide that fishing in rough weather is too dangerous. A comfortable bureaucrat will decide. Con specifically states that such activities though too dangerous must be disallowed.Because there are no objective standards for what is dangerous, the government can control whatever it wishes. The point of something being a right is that the government must make a compelling case to restrict your rights, but if it is a privilege, then no case need be made. For example, the right to free speech can be restricted, but the government must prove that doing so is justified in terms of preserving others rights. If free speech were a privilege, there is no obstacle to arbitrary restrictions. Regimes that restrict speech do so with the claim that such speech is dangerous.Con argues that the state is the only institution that allows us "all to have our voices heard." He cites McDonald's as an example. McDonald's is extremely responsive to the desires of it's customers. They adjust menus http://www.montrealgazette.com... and have great concern over customer complaints. ("BBB has determined that McDonald's meets BBB accreditation standards, which include a commitment to make a good faith effort to resolve any consumer complaints." http://www.bbb.org... ) Con's problem is that people who are not customers are not able to control the hamburger-eaters. Perhaps a enlightened bureaucracy could force them to eat tofu. This is called "the tyranny of the majority" which someone dined as "the right of the 51% to pee on the cornflakes of the 49%." What it is about is _control_. The argument is that an elite should decide what is best for each person and then force it.There is no chance that questions of what is dangerous would be put to voters. Americans would never declare hamburgers to be dangerous, and they would never be asked. The way it would work is that an empowered bureaucracy, properly educated at elite institutions, would make all the decisions under the premise that they are smart and everyone else is dumb.Pro argues that democratic government works because "the strength of these opinions generally directly translates into the decisions made by the government. What we should and should not be allowed to do is something we all have our own opinions about." I believe that is the major weakness of democratic government. Loud voices do tend to prevail, and they do so at the expense of the rights of the individual. Loud voices are often ideologues, who are the dumbest people in society, not the smartest. That's why we need rights to protect individuals from the tyranny of the majority. The "majority" in practice, is often not the numerical majority, but the majority of strident true believers.P4. Government restrictions on choice are unneeded and ineffectiveRight now, Jackie Chan gets to choose his stunts, fishermen decide when to set out to sea, and the dangerous professions are self-regulated by individual judgment. Ski resorts restrict who goes on what slope based upon their concern over a reputation for safety, and because of the costs of insurance. There is no problem for government to solve.Genuinely foolish people who endanger themselves are not in the least impressed by government rules.