A five-year-old is protected by his parents, who do so temporarily. As the five-year-old grows up, he is parented less. When he is grown up, they cease parenting him altogether except insofar as perhaps offering advice when it is sought. There is no more bed-time, though.

No more sit-up-straight.

The child becomes an adult and is respected as such, if the parent is not pathological. Government parenting is precisely that.

Armed busybodies order us to buckle-up and wear helmets as if we were the government's children. Such things are no more the legitimate business of the government that they are of random other adults ordering other adults to do those things. Most of us would not submit to such orders from other adults, absent badges and guns. The badges and guns coerce submission but earn (and deserve) contempt because we know that not wearing a seatbelt or a helmet injures no other person or even threatens to and for that reason  exactly, it is none of the government's legitimate business.

It is why no one who gets what is styled a "ticket" – as if it were something you got from the dry cleaner's – feels any guilt about getting one. Nor shame in court. People who commit crimes feel shame (assuming they aren't sociopaths) because they understand they have harmed someone. They accept the justice of punishment. Is there a person in the country who feels that they have been justly treated when an armed government worker "pulls them over" – as if this were some sort of friendly and consensual interaction, just ti say hello and have a chat – and hands them a "ticket" that means they will have to hand over a large sum of money to the government?

The answer is as obvious as it is telling.

Another way to look at it is this way: Any law that most people would ignore if they did not fear armed government workers is not a moral law. It is merely "the law." It is important to draw – and to understand – the distinction. "The law" is whatever a government says it is. It once "the law" to turn in "fugitive" slaves. Was that a moral law? Is it moral to sic armed government workers on people just because "the law" says they must wear a seatbelt or a helmet while riding a motorcycle?