The no victims claims when there is a fatal accident: I think this is right for a reason Gavin does not give, early deaths are money saving because dead people don’t need medical care or state benefits. This is why smoking is a net benefit financially to tax payers.

There are different issues for non-fatal accidents though. What Gavin emphasises is that the NHS is funded by taxes, so the cost of caring for someone who wasn’t wearing a seat belt is covered by all tax payers. This is known as moral hazard. But moral hazard does not just exist for tax funded services. If the NHS was abolished, health care would be funded by a mixture of insurance, charity and up front payments by those able to find the necessary amount of money. Other people who pay insurance are victims of moral hazard when insurance funds cover someone who did something careless. People who donate to charity or who depend on charity also suffer a version of moral hazard in this case. Even people who pay cash up front might suffer moral hazard because in a completely private health sector, health providers will sometimes be unable to collect debts from careless people who were taken to an emergency facility, pushing up the cost of health services for everyone.

What Gavin objects to is moral hazard but moral hazard does not just exist in relation to tax funded services. Of course private companies can try to cut out people who create moral hazard, and everyone who pushes up the prices of services and insurance. However, this rather undermines the idea that health care can effectively be provided on a private basis with no public involvement at all. Excluding bad risks from insurance, or bumping up their premiums, will inevitably raise premiums for half the population and make some people effectively uninsurable, often for reasons beyond their control.

Gavin appears to be against all taxes, with the possibility of taxes which pay for basic laws and order. His language about wage slaves and the final sanction of state violence in collecting taxes certainly suggests this. That’s clearly a view within the libertarian range of views and should be expressed sometimes on Liberal Vision. However, I don’t see it as part of Classical Liberalism. The Classical Liberals from Locke to Mill, including Adam Smith, Kant, Tocqueville tc, all lived in societies where taxes were collected for reasons other than basic law and order. Apart from Bastiat and Humboldt, they mostly thought that such taxes are justifiable if they are based on consent, expressed collectively through an elected legislative body, and presuming that citizens can still keep most of their income and property.

It’s Marxists who first referred to wage slaves, it always worries me when Libertarians use Marxist language. Marxism contains a utopian impulse in which we can live with no state and all property/income will be distributed according to principles of absolute justice with no coercion returning to the workers who create value. Anarcho-capitalists/hard libertarians have a parallel impulse, we can live with no state or a very minimal state in which property and income will be distributed according to pure justice, returning to the creators of value.

I’m an ex-Marxist myself, and I’m not looking to exchange one utopia for another. Like most Classical Liberals, I think we should start with society as it is, expanding individual responsibility and freedom, but accepting that an element of state enforced collective solutions has been part of any known civilised society, and that means any society with functioning markets, and that will continue to be the case.

There are certainly victims when someone not wearing a seat belt is killed in an accident where they would have survived had they been wearing the belt – their loved ones at the very least. As an example – the late David Penhaligon.