Elections

TODAY, all eyes are on the Democratic Party, as it convenes to name its candidates for the U. S. elections in November. However, there is something strange about the convention; the most prominent Democrats, the representatives and senators, are “more equal,” they are super-delegates. This is not democracy, it is aristocracy.

Is this not aberrant? In U. S. elections, “no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.” There is an obvious reason why: senators, representatives and other officers are tax-spenders, not tax-payers.

But, you may object, the electors are not really important; they only follow the popular vote in their own State, or congressional district. That, I respond, is what is wrong! How do the political parties – which exist for the purpose of electing officers – proceed? They meet in national conventions – because the delegates from Alabama do not know those from Wyoming, or even those from Alaska. The convention is an occasion to work out a concensus; often, a candidate is nominated by acclamation, rather than by winning a majority or a plurality of the delegates. And the political parties have the process right; the citizens in the congressional districts should be well able to find an elite to serve as electors, and that elite should indeed be acquainted with those men, or women, throughout the States best qualified to be president or vice president.

You are still not convinced? Then read again both Article II and Amendment XII. You will see that the lists are “sealed” in the States and “open[ed]” by the president of the senate. Why? Because the electors meet and vote and make their lists in closed, secret sessions. Thus aspirants to be president have no opportunity to go to representatives and make promises in exchange for votes: the House chooses the new president “immediately” the vice president has counted the names on the lists.

Does it matter whether the citizens in their districts vote for three (or more) electors or for president and vice president? Yes, indeed! The potential electors are citizens of the State, and – presumably – fairly well known to the voters. The aspirants to be p. and v. p. are strangers in 48 of the States; therefore, they seek to raise great sums of money with which to advertize. And, one suspects, the people who give them money expect – and, indeed, often receive – favors in return. Think back eight years: Clinton and Gore always seemed to have ample time to cultivate Chinese friends. Look at it the other way; if the electors took their duties literally, then being an elector would be a way for distinguished citizens to perform public service without giving up their professions and migrating to the District of Columbia.

Economy

HOW, EXACTLY, do we economize our scarce resources? Is it a Good Idea to inflate the tires of vehicles harder?

If so, why not have solid tires – just as a century ago? Obviously, because they would tend to break up the pavement, and even the vehicle. In fact, the highway managements would do themselves a favor if they charged operators fees increasing with tire pressure; then operators would use lower pressures when the vehicle was lightly loaded and higher pressures when fully loaded.

But this would require the managements to check the tire pressures; how could that be done? How, now, do they check the vehicle weight? Now, they have expensive weighing machines that require all the heavy vehicles to pull off the highway and wait in turn to drive slowly over a scale. If the charges were based on tire pressure, the highway managers could simply wait at the diesel pumps and check the vehicles when they pulled in (except, I admit, in small States which the vehicles could traverse without refueling.)

What would prevent the operators using low pressures, even when fully loaded? The fact that the tires would run hot and wear out rapidly – and would tend to disintegrate when running fast, which is depressing for the drivers.

This is merely a trivial example of the fact that the highways are badly managed. The management should be trying to utilize the highway to its utmost – in plain words, keeping it running fast but also full of vehicles. This is the opposite of what we see the highways doing; they keep the number of users down by making driving licenses compulsory – an unconcealed protection racket – and charging expensive registration fees, and impose taxes on motor vehicle fuel that do nothing to spread the traffic out evenly through the 24 hours or the seven days. And then they flagrantly waste the money that they collect; many States maintain Highway Patrols, which are utterly unnecessary now that the operators carry cell phones and citizens’-band radios, and thus can call for emergency services if anyone needs them.

Another example; it is the rule rather than the exception for the States to require operators to insure against liability. This means that any harm in anything beyond the simplest one-man/one-vehicle incident gives rise to a dispute between insurers. Insurers are not in business to make law, they are in business to make money; they merely compromise the cases. Thus the issue of what, in truth, caused the harm is seldom or never settled; badly managed highways do not have to pay damages and therefore go bankrupt, leaving the highway engineers and patrolmen to beg in the gutters . . . . STOP signs, even four-way STOP signs, remain for years, for decades, for generations . . . .

Four centuries ago, the inhabitants of this country were, to coin a phrase, lean and hungry men. That has changed. Unless you believe that there is a phenomenon called evolution, which brings order out of randomness, you must agree that men changed it. Thus there is no reason why men should allow wanton waste to persist.

Why does it persist? Fifteen years ago, the historian John Lukacs, in "The Hitler of History," developed the thesis that Fascism has now been adopted by all the nations that fought against Mussolini and Hitler: privately-owned assets, such as motor vehicles, are being publicly managed. We need to establish the opposite principle, that publicly-owned assets, such as the highways, should be privately managed, by entities that have to make them pay or else be superceded by better managers.

Then we should no longer see the nation-wide worship of waste. We should no longer see that the Ford Freeway, serving the busiest port on the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles/Long Beach, has no connection to the Interstate Highway System. We should no longer see that vehicles without EZ-Pass (a device whereby you make interest-free loans to the highway system) cannot reach Manhattan before 6 a.m. We might even no longer see vehicles carrying freight and vehicles carrying minds all running along the highways at the same speed. Perhaps, we should no longer see airliners queueing on taxiways with their engines running, or stacked up in the sky, waiting for a runway.

Fossil Fuel Frenzy

IF we can believe the media, there is an imperative to economize on fossil fuels, such as oil. The obvious solution is to use hybrid or plug-in automobiles.

Suppose you commute from 25 miles away, and average twelve miles per gallon: then you use four gallons a day, you spend sixteen or twenty dollars a day, less than $5000 a year. A car that will use only half as much fuel would save you $2500 a year; can you buy such a vehicle for $25,000? Who would buy anything that takes ten years to pay for itself? (Answer, someone who expects to find a greater fool.)

And if there were so many “green” operators, did the new, efficient vehicles appear by magic? Someone, somewhere, digs out the iron ore; someone smelts it into steel; someone trucks it to Detroit, several other people take ten thousand pieces and make them into a whole that works first time, every time . . . . Yes, they all did this quite willingly, but they all eat and drink and wear clothes and occupy dwellings and commute to work; they all turn energy into entropy (order into disorder.) And, now you mention it. there is the question, what happened to the 12-m-p-g car? Did you pay someone to crush it? Or did you sell it to someone who could not afford a new car – so it’s still burning gas, if not quite as much?

Now suppose that you had been bright enough to buy yourself an oil well. You have to decide, do I sell the oil today, or tomorrow? If you answer, tomorrow, then someone else will make the profit you passed up, which is a pity. Perhaps, the day will come when every well is dry except yours, you will be able to charge any price you wish – perhaps. But perhaps, because you left your oil in the ground, consumers switched to heating and cooking with natural gas, and put solar panels on their roof, and bought autos that run on hydrogen . . . . So, we may say, the notion that we will ever actually burn the last drop of oil is fantastic (unless the oil is owned by some mindless monopoly.)

What, then, should we do about the scarcity of motor fuel? Easy – abolish the Environmental Protection Agency! First of all, there is only one body which has a say in every State, and it is the Congress; “Congress shall have power …To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the … Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” Even in its own home, the District of Columbia, the Congress has “exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever;” Nothing the E. P. A. says or does has any force or effect within these United States.

And it is time – long past the time – for the States to silence the E. P. A. Has it ever secured four sets of identical instruments capable of measuring pollution (if there is any such thing as pollution to be measured) and set them up in Anchorage, Alaska, Balboa, California, Brownsville, Texas, and Bar Harbor, Maine, to see whether the atmosphere is indeed indistinguishable in all those places? Because if not, why should we believe that the same techniques should be used in all those places? If each State is self-governing, then some of them – Rhode Island, perhaps – may indeed adopt some uniform statewide regulations: but some of them – Alaska, perhaps – will think that federalism is a Good Thing, and leave every county to fend for itself. Then some counties will insist on Red engines burning Red fuel, others will allow Blue engines burning Blue fuel.

But State legislators are not full-time office-holders, they have to be capable of supporting themselves by selling some service that their neighbors prize; we can be fairly sure that every State, and every county, will muster enough reasoning power to realize that big, heavy, expensive vehicles have to cover a great deal of distance to earn their keep, and will require that they have much cleaner exhausts than small, light vehicles (only inside the Beltway do people believe that all vehicles are equal in fuel consumed per annum or per mensem.)

Every Day a Holiday!

HAS CONGRESS actually done something right? Yes, incredibly! A gas tax holiday would indeed advance the general welfare, which – remember? – Congress is authorized to do. The function of a price is to render supply and demand equal – but the gas tax does not do this, it is the same on all highways at all times.

The only justification for a gas tax would be, that the vehicles wear out the pavement. However, this is not true; motorcycles use their fuel to overcome wind resistance, and even cars do little damage (notice that parkways, which exclude commercial vehicles, do quite well with only “flexible” pavement, whereas the Interstate is everywhere concrete.)

The purpose of any fee or charge is, to bring supply and demand into balance. What we see is that supply and demand are in balance at few places and few times; we often see highways empty, we often see them overloaded. Instead of the States selling plates that allow access to every highway, the plates should admit the vehicle to only the State highways; an additional charge should be imposed (perhaps by the Congress?) to use the Interstate system. And those highways that regularly become overloaded, and therefore slow to a crawl, should demand tolls during the peak traffic periods.

The usual objections to tolls are, that half of the revenue is consumed by the cost of collecting it, and that the tollgates slow the traffic down. But these objections would cease to be true if the tolls were charged electronically, as in New Jersey and New York by the E-Z Pass system, and only at the times when the traffic would otherwise be jammed.

These are actually reforms, and not, as usual with Congress, restraints. Anyone who doesn’t want to ask the U. S. for a plate can still go anywhere by using State and county roads; anyone who doesn’t want to make an interest-free loan to the E-Z Pass system can merely travel at off-peak periods.

Of course, it would be even better to reverse the present-day policy of wasting the operators’ fuel. Minimum speeds should be posted. STOP signs should be replaced by YIELD signs. “No turn on red” could be abolished, at least for the rightmost lane; “No right turn” could be restricted to one-way streets. The yellow signal could be lit up in both directions. Double yellow lines could be painted to use the center lanes in both directions, at least where the road is straight and level. Parking meters, which require the pavement to be divided into a finite number of spaces, could be replaced by buy-a-ticket systems.

I find it funny – but not amusing – that, now the society is obviously in danger of collapse, we are suddenly hearing cries of Fascism! Ten years ago, John Lukacs, in The Hitler of History [Knopf, New York: 1998,] pointed out that Fascism had even then been adopted by all the nations that fought against Hitler’s Germany. Surely it is obvious that what we need is the exact opposite of Fascism; instead of public management of private property, we need private management of public property. If the national parks, and the coastal waters, were being managed by the highest bidders, then they would have been searched intensively for oil (or gold, or coal, or any other valuable thing) long ago. If driving licences were being given by Hertz and Avis and National Car Rental, even a child could get one, if se could actually drive. Why not put a stop to compulsory school attendance – the kids who drop out are not learning anything, just wasting expensive teachers’ time? The fact that the schools are free should be enough to keep them busy . . . .

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.”