I kinda get what you’re saying. I can’t remember how many times my parents would yell at me as a kid for climbing too high up a tree or swimming too far past the shore, and I always came back. I knew what I could handle, and made sure I didn’t go further than I was able, but my parents could only understand what they could see, and they didn’t trust that I was able to handle it. The issue is that they had no way to know what I knew, and they can’t do their job of keeping me safe by trusting that I knew what I was doing, because if I was wrong and got hurt, we’d all pay the price.

Different people carry different risks, even when performing the same task. A professional driver is a safer driver than a teenager with a permit. The question is how much risk we’re willing to allow before we say it’s too much. The law is there to make sure that everyone is safe, and so everyone has to operate at the same level. The sacrifice we make is that, for example, the professional driver who could probably drive safely at 100 mph in a 60mph zone has to drive at 60 mph, because the teenager with a permit is barely able to drive safely at 60, and if we let the professional drive 100, we’d have to let the teenager drive 100, too.