FINANCING THE PUBLIC HIGHWAYS
One hardly expects to hear anything sensible spoken in an election year, but such cynicism was shattered when Senator McCain proposed a “tax holiday” for motor vehicle fuel. The only thing that could be better for the general welfare would be absolute abolition of the tax.

The very idea of a price is that it balances supply and demand. The simplest soul can see that the supply of highway is fixed, but the demand varies from day to day, from hour to hour; hence the highways are sometimes running fast, sometimes choked. When the highway is over-loaded, the vehicles are wasting time and fuel and brake linings, but the tax collectors are contentedly collecting. Because of the fuel tax, everywhere we see STOP signs instead of YIELD signs, stop-on-red instead of go-on-green lights, maximum instead of minimum speed limits, highways divided to prevent the traffic sharing the lanes efficiently, “speed bumps” that are actually delay bumps . And in many, if not all, States, there are exhaust emission limits which demand wasteful engines.

If the highways were being managed to make a profit, there would be very expensive licence plates which gave access to county and State and Interstate highways, and less expensive ones for county and State highways, and quite cheap plates for only county roads. Where there were tolls, the tolls would be high at peak hours and low when traffic was sparse. If there were exhaust emission limits, they would be restrictive only for powerful vehicles with inter-state plates, permissive for small vehicles using county roads.

Observe that these reforms would indeed serve the general welfare; everything you consume was brought to your door by a vehicle using fuel which is, at present, taxed (unless you live in a city that is compressed into an island or peninsula, like Manhattan or San Francisco.) Do not fear that the highways would suddenly begin to deteriorate: firstly, they are already being allowed to deteriorate, and secondly, the fuel tax revenue is not dedicated to the restoration of wear and tear, it is squandered by the Congress.

Let me make plain what I am advocating. I am advocating an end to the public highways being publicly managed - which means, irresponsibly managed. I contend that they should be publicly owned but PRIVATELY managed, by the highest bidder: if any management does not succeed in attracting users and showing profits, then after five (or ten, or twenty) years someone more enterprising will bid the function away from hir.

Self-described Democrats seem to be at a loss in finding a candidate for the presidency this year. Should they meet in convention, or merely count up the delegates chosen in the several State primaries?
What do they think DEMOCRACY means?
Suppose you want to know, does a cannon ball fall faster than a musket ball? You ask one person, se says; “Certainly not.” You ask another; “Yes, of course.” What do you do? You ask them to come together and work it out, do you not?
Suppose the two can’t reach agreement, what then? You ask some more people to join. Soon, you have so many people they cannot all hear. What now?
Now, you have several small meetings, each one of which sends a trustworthy representative to a general meeting to settle the question.
Every political party, even the fiercely individualist Libertarians, holds a convention; the idea of a national convention is that it can consider and compare candidates from all the States. No individual knows all the possible candidates, but by taking counsel together they can cut the field down, fewer and fewer and fewer . . . .
However, much depends on the purpose of the party. Some, even most, of the members want the person who would make the bext president, but the ones running for office themselves want whoever is best at campaigning. And there have even been parties that existed to advance one person – President Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, Governor Wallace’s American Independent Party, Ross Perot’s Reform Party.
So that it would seem to be a good idea to make sure that the people voting in the convention really are equal; those running for office themselves should be excluded, or at least relegated to a second house.
But the Democrats have done the very opposite! They have made representatives and senators SUPER-delegates,
So that either the Democratic Party, the oldest party in the United States, is wrong, or I am wrong. Which is it?
Look at the Constitution. Art, II, Sec.1, para. 2: “Each State shall appoint . . . a number of electors . . . but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.”
If, in a State, persons holding offices of trust or profit (e.g. F.B.I., Customs, I.R.S., Homeland Security agents, U.S. attorneys) are allowed to vote, then hoi polloi [most people] are less fit to be trusted than the electors; those States that require the electors to follow the popular vote are, to put it politely, misguided.
Or, once again, perhaps I am wrong?
Look again at the Constitution. Art. II, Sec. 1, para. 3: “The Electors shall . . . make a list of . . . the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the . . . President of the Senate shall . . . open all the certificates . . .”
The words “sealed” and “open” make it plain not only that the electors hammer out a decision of their own, but that the great mass of citizens do not even know what they have done until after the election has been decided. The great mass (which is all too great, including as it does the illiterates and the senile) are used for the purpose they can best serve, which is choosing the best person in their congressional district to go to the conclave and select one or two candidates.
Yes, it is a democracy in the classical sense that the many speak first, the few only later; but it is not a democracy in the populist sense, that the minority dominate over the minority.