>>>Just to be clear though, there is not reason parents cannot exercise whatever safety rules they like for their children, or that anyone cannot choose for themselves to take whatever precautions. Good judgement and good parent actually can and do exist without government intervention or supervision.
>>
>>like the father in Connecticut who allow his 10 year old to shoot an Uzi and kill himself or the most recent case where a youngster fed a wood chipper in got sucked in.
>
>If the nannystate didn't exist and people were allowed to exist on their own merits, eventually you would see a smarter, stronger society (see the US through the 1950s) instead of the continuously weakening society we have in the US today.
>
>Always pandering to the lowest common denominator moves the curve steadily towards the lowest common denominator.

Actually, worse than that - people just give up on things they would normally do, because they are suddenly forbidden or require extensive precautions.

A simple example: here, in the villages all over the Pannonian flatlands, nobody was mowing the lawns. Geese did that. Then, one year while I was away, there was allegedly some danger from the bird flu, and the state copypasted some law from somewhere (I bet the legislature must have made, or failed to notice, a few translation errors) and prescribed cages of certain size, quality etc. The cost of such a cage would be about twice the value of the geese, and there was a mass slaughter of geese. Now you drive through a village and it's all green - low cut where there's someone with a mower, or knee high or higher where not. Only ten years ago, there were villages where you had to drive very carefully - if the geese chose the grass was greener on the other side of the street, you'd have to wait for a few dozen of them to cross.

And the total number of cases in the world for the last nine years is 602.