TAKE NOTE: Political Standing.

[A Black Falcon]

There are no speed limits on some roads... the only place in the US I know of is some roads in, I believe, Montana. But they only work in specific places, as in places where there are no houses or people living and, hopefully, isn't likely to be much traffic. See, Darunia, as DJ explained the faster you go the worse your reaction time. That means that there is a direct connection between higher speeds and more accidents. It also makes accidents worse. And given that one of the tasks of any government is protecting its people, speed limits are an obvious and very smart way to greatly reduce road deaths. They're also not that intrusive, really...

Oh yeah, the people don't own the government per se. We choose who represents us there and hopefully they recognize that they are responsible to the people, but 'own the government'? It's impossible for any people to run a government without much of a governing body beyond themselves once you get over a population in the lower thousands (10,000 can be done, but 20,000? Maybe.). That's why no big cities, even in New England, have town meetings. It gets untenable once you get too large. So, you have to have people represent you. Yeah, they are responsible to you. But the people can't do everything so they will necessarially know more than you... and obviously there are some things that the government does that people don't like but should be able to recognize if they thought about it are really for their own benifit. Like taxes, or speed limits.

Yes, this is a tough issue and sometimes the government certainly has gone too far. But my point really is that there is a limit on each end -- too little government (total anarchy!) would be as big a disaster as a too opressive one (think Nazis).