Cell-Phone Ban in Cars Extreme

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In 1773 our forefathers were faced with 3% tax on their favorite breakfast beverage, and they responded by blowing the heads off government officials. A new country was born, conceived in liberty.

Fast-forward 238 years. The National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) has now recommended that someone in Washington D.C., and its subservient vassal states, make illegal all use of electronic devices that aren't "designed to support the driving task." I guess that means that it's fine to deal with your smartphone if you make use of Google's free navigation software in Android, but it's not okay to do something else.

Do you know the people at the NTSB? Can you name a name over there? Me, neither. And yet, these faceless bureaucrats are now attempting to interfere in what was supposed to be a free people.

The reason for this attempt at telling people how to conduct their lives, was a fatal accident where someone was distracted by a cell phone. Sure, these things happen. But they also happened before there were cell phones. There were no car accidents in the 1970s?

What excuse did people have in the 1970s, seeing as they can't possibly have been distracted by a cell phone? Surely anyone involved in a car accident in the 1970s must have been put into a mental institution or worse, seeing as he or she was not using a cell phone.

Even by the standards of a government bureaucrat, a blanket ban on cell phones is absurd. There are obviously complicated traffic situations where smart people avoid allowing themselves from becoming distracted, but there are also long stretches of freeways in the desert when you don't see a person for tens of miles.

In addition, different people can handle equipment differently. Some people are bad drivers and probably shouldn't allow themselves to be distracted. Other people can handle all sorts of distractions and still be an above-average safety driver. Why treat people with different skills the same? We are not a world of equal intelligence and skill, and the government should not try to dumb everyone down to the lowest common denominator.