Paternalism manifests itself in different ways.

Today I drove out into the country to have lunch with a friend who has a weekend cottage. Once you get off the highway, the drive to her place goes on country roads that meet at right angles and bank around curves and rise and fall with the hills.

It put me in mind of country drives in Australia - Southern Queensland, inland from the Gold Coast; Northern New South Wales, on the way to Cassino; Cessnock and environs in the coal fields around Newcastle.

One thing that alarms and positively terrifies me here are the motorcycle hobbyists who don't wear any protective gear. They ride around on weekends on these gigantic noisy Harleys with oversized engines, with no helmet, no leathers, just t-shirt and jeans, and often they have a girl on the back wearing even less, shorts and thongs usually. But Wisconsin doesn't have a helmet law because it would impinge on these riders' freedom of choice to ride with the wind in their hair, and faces and elbows and knees and etc. They don't seem to realize how easily a big bike can go down, and how quickly and horrendously pavement and speed can mess up their bodies and lives. I always drive very carefully around them, cringing.

But then, in contrast, today I was driving fast on country roads and remembering how terrifying it usually is in Australia, on those narrow two-lane roads around Dungog and Kurri Kurri, with the locals racing around blind corners in their panel vans exceeding the recommended speed limit by 20-30%. Today the roads were not terrifying at all, and most of the time I was going 60 mph at least (which is 100 kph in the new money). Why was this so? Because the Wisconsin road department has smoothed out the dangerous curves and levelled the big dips that caused blind crests, and keeps the pavement in tip-top shape all the time and has the lines painted clearly and all intersections sensibly marked from a long way off.

They don't make laws to make the Harley riders wear helmets, to protect them from themselves, but they do take care to make the roads really really safe, to protect all of us from each other.