Fifty-five Folly

WASHINGTON, D.C., the theater of folly, has, we hear, proposed to re-resort to a national maximum speed limit on the highways – supposedly, to economize on precious motor fuel. Who, outside the Beltway, believes that the operators are squandering fuel? Anyone who lives in the hard, cold world of profit-and-loss knows better: se is endlessly struggling with STOP signs, no-turn-on-red junctions, stop-on-red instead of go-on-green lights, double yellow lines laid down to waste space and time, highways divided so that the traffic cannot load all the lanes equally heavily, intersections where there are no additional lanes, “speed bumps” that are actually “fuel bumps”. . . . The highway managements exist on the fuel tax, and do everything in their power to waste gasoline and diesel oil.

What is the proper response? It would be to impose charges that actually bring demand and supply into balance, that keep the traffic moving freely. License plates should cost least for county highways, more for county-and-state highways, more still for county-and-state- and-interstate highways. Bridge and tunnel tolls should be high at busy hours, low or zero at quiet times. Commercial vehicles should be charged, not on weight, but on tire pressure, which could be checked quickly at filling stations; operators would be sure to reduce pressures – and thus damage to the pavement – when the vehicle was unloaded.

And, more important still, there must be an end to the power of the reckless Environmental Protection Agency. Its capricious national mandates result in wasteful engines being used in every State. Once each State were prescribing its own emission limits, we should see some of the States admitting that high-powered engines burn more fuel than low-powered ones. Surely, there would appear incentives for people to migrate from States that were badly governed to those that were not.

We might well ask, just who is crying, “Peak oil?” The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries does not admit that it has raised prices. If the price of oil is plotted in terms of gold, it is not rising but falling now, Spring 2008. Do we see teams of geological prospectors setting off detonations and plotting echoes all over the country? (Vast areas are still virgin; we hear there is an elusive Bakken Trend.) On television, we see shots of enormous oil rigs floating in the oceans – but I never see any of them when flying near this country.

There is another detail that seems not to be discussed. If the maximum speed is reduced, costs go up; it needs six trucks and twelve men, instead of five and ten, to bring steaks from Chicago to New York, for instance. A traveler who spends six hours driving at 55, instead of five at 66 and one sleeping, is liable to close hir eyes and collide with you; so insurance premiums go up. And costs in these United States are already more than high enough: we hear hoi polloi contending for what they call protection (i.e. that the many consumers subsidize the few producers.)

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s dictum, “It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error,” is as true today as it was six decades ago – but it would be more enlightening if it read, “It is not the function of a State to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of a State to keep the Union from falling into error.”