> I am a libertarian, and government has no business protecting us from ourselves, but it does have a duty to make sure I don't injure or kill someone else.<p>This falls in a category of state action where I don't disagree with the intentions of the bill, but I still think of it as squandering legislative resources.<p>It reminds me of a recent debate in a nearby county over whether or not to put speed cameras in school zones. The argument was that children should be protected from dangerous driving, which is basically indisputable. Those opposed pointed out that no children had ever been injured in the county's school zones, raising concerns that the measure was designed purely for revenue, when other intersections probably needed better enforcement.<p>Now, I don't know, maybe the County Commissioner had a kid approaching school age, and saw someone speed on that road, and made some hasty, biased risk calculations. I don't know if the chance for "tickets in school zones" money drove the push.<p>But I feel like we are generally terrible at catching the "opportunity costs" of legislation. If W. Va. wants to stop people from killing each other on the roadways, maybe it shouldn't be looking at Google Glass, but looking to add structural improvements to its most dangerous intersections, on-ramps, and exit-ramps. It could prevent deaths next year without making anything else illegal.<p>Since a legislature can only solve so many problems in a year, fixing the imagined "google glass" problem actually means other problems go unsolved. Because of that, even if they were solving a real problem, it could still reflect a failure of governance.<p>The investment analogy would be that it's not enough to just get some return on investment, your measuring stick is whether or not you make a better return than you could have for equivalent risk. Mere profit is sometimes a waste of capital. Legislation that saves one or two lives over the course of the next 20 years, but squanders the opportunity to save hundreds more, should be seen as essentially responsible for the difference in deaths.<p>I don't think we've really solved this problem for public action though in any state, not to mention the national level.<p>I'd be interested if anyone has a solution. So far all I've got is "only let actuaries vote," but that might not be the utopian paradise I imagine...