Jun
22
Freedom At Risk
June 22, 2011 | 6 Comments
One hundred years ago having a horse was the vehicle of personal freedom – personal transportation, the means to go where we want when we want. Loose that and freedom as an experience of life will diminish, the standard of living as felt collapses, access to choice goes out of reach. Your freedom is under attack.
Watching the current U.S. administration with now two and a half years of real world activity makes clear that personal transportation falls far behind the environmental perspective. What makes news out of the government are efforts to cut CO2, not reduce the costs of energy or increase supplies, or make for a better freedom experience. The facts are actually the opposite.
Most people aren’t watching, and the media is wholly in the dark. The Obama administration is deep into canceling the personal freedom of personal transport. What President Obama calls his “livability” program is really a war on cars and “sprawl”.
According to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, ‘livability’ means “being able to take your kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, drop by the grocery or post office, go out to dinner and a movie, and play with your kids at the park, all without having to get into your car.” It hasn’t occurred to LaHood that the closest isn’t necessarily the best, cheapest, safest or tolerable – if you can get there on foot, for these bureaucrats its good enough.
In promoting the agenda, LaHood wants every metropolitan area in America to include anti-automobile concepts in its long-range transportation plans. Now, under federal law, metro areas are required to write such plans every five years. The administration wants the next round of such plans to incorporate anti-auto policies such as expensive transit projects and land-use rules aimed at discouraging driving and encouraging other methods of travel.
The anti personal transport battle is older than realized. Twenty years ago Oregon first passed a state land-use commission ruling requiring major cities to reduce per capita driving by 30 percent (later reduced to 20 percent) within 30 years. The Washington state legislature topped that by passing a law requiring a 50-percent reduction in per capita driving by 2050. The California legislature has also passed a law requiring all cities to reduce per capita driving. The enemy is further along than almost everyone realizes.
The CO2 and pollution basis is disappearing fast. Today’s new cars emit about 1% of the pollution of cars from the 1970s when air pollution was a visible problem. Driving is up about 3 fold and pollution is down two thirds and declining. CO2 is for the informed a non-issue, but CO2 remains media ammunition for the war on personal transportation freedom.
Very few moderate-income suburbs could exist without personal transportation. Suburbia would be the region of the rich – like it was before the automobile – a costly luxurious lifestyle. Those homes, on plat of land for a yard and garden, four outside walls not joined to others, trees and open spaces for children are products of low cost energy and fuel feeding the automobile. Its low-density population, everyone has territory, not a lot, but personal and owned. It’s called “Sprawl”.
The choice the anti personal transport crowd offers is high-density population. The front door opens on a hallway, no yard, garden, buffer space, or trees. The children will roam those halls – open spaces will be some distance away seeing the children from the window -an impossibility. Being secure will be much harder, and a mistake or accident anywhere in the structure endangers everyone. They used to call high density living in urban areas ‘tenements’.
Other states are following the west coast lead – Hawaii, Florida, Massachusetts, plus municipal governments in Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and several other urban areas.
The crowd leading the anti personal transport battle is seeking power and rents from everyone else. If people are limited in travel the choices are what’s up close, competition suffers, choices disappear. Spending is guided to the product and price by proximity. Shopping as a pleasure or pastime will cease.
One presumes there is some self-gratification for the effort behind anti personal transport, suburbia, and travel liberty of Americans. Controlling the territory and choices of others seems to have some deep psychological drive in some people. History has many examples, all of which seem to end at great human cost after astonishing human misery.
It’s a sure bet that the administration’s inaction and misaction in the mortgage and housing market disaster is driven by anti personal transport coupled to pushing the population to urban rent based low choice locations. There could have been a revisiting of the U.S. Constitution’s Bankruptcy Provision by Congress for a new chapter to address the problem. Your humble writer isn’t keen to see others get help paying for their homes, but the cost in lost wealth to everyone else from the market harm stall the entire economy. The lost asset base of American homes, lost jobs and business is a larger disaster than the cost of foreclosures. It didn’t have to happen. Bankruptcy has been in the Constitution from the start, it’s the envy of the world. Bankruptcy s a fresh start for individuals, but it can be a “reset button for the economy” when an entire market hits the wall. The Congress simply failed dismally in its responsibility.
The OPEC cartel, third world development, national instead of independent oil companies, hysteria in environmentalism, and the anti personal transportation crowd are factors herding the world into paying rents and royalties set without competition. Some of the work they do is increasing standards of living, just greed, some conniving; some conspiracy, and some may lead to war.
There are people out there with power and influence who seek to take away your freedom to travel how, when and where you choose. Their efforts cover a vast range that accumulates fellow travelers with a wide spectrum of motivations.
But when one thinks of where such ideas will take us, the realization sets in – this is a fight for life as one chooses – against a life as others would have it foisted upon us.
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It is a war on personal freedom and yet another way to control the people. (I would say citizens but I don’t believe that is what we are anymore. We were citizens. But, we are on our way to becoming subjects.)
Meanwhile, the Federal Limo fleet has increased by 73% under Obama.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20067610-10391695.html
I agree that the “war on cars” is stupid.
However, you should be aware that for generations that federal government has subsidized rural economies, and heavily. Basically, rural America would just about blow away without federal subsidies.
Everything in rural America relies on federal dollars, from highways to water and power systems, to postal service, telephone service ($8 billion a year for this alone), and placement of defense installations, and the entire USDA, Interior departments.
Wipe that out, and we would become a much more urbanized nation–proeprly so.
The history of modern economies is that they become increasingly urbanized, continuously. All over the world, it is central cities that become most valuable. This is even beginning to happen in America, despite horrible urban politics, and boneheaded politicians.
Remember, we have two Senators from every state, and a very powerful farm-rural bloc. I call it the Red State Socialist Empire.
Agree with the post. If you want to cut the car use, you only need to fail to repair or close the roads. Social engineering is alive and well in the US.
And the commentor who says the rural areas are subsidized. Sure they are. But, if they were not subsidized, and if they had to pay the true cost for what they used some essentials would rise in price for city dwellers.
Also, it’s a kinda odd arguement that a road or telecom system that goes from city to city is somehow really providing subsidized services to the intervening rural areas. The train that used to carry the mail cross country stopped at the big cities on the way but just hung out mail on a hook as it blew by.
Agree with the post. If you want to cut the car use, you only need to fail to repair or close the roads. Social engineering is alive and well in the US.
And the commentor who says the rural areas are subsidized. Sure they are. But, if they were not subsidized, and if they had to pay the true cost for what they used some essentials would rise in price for city dwellers.
Also, it’s a kinda odd arguement that a road or telecom system that goes from city to city is somehow really providing subsidized services to the intervening rural areas. The train that used to carry the mail cross country stopped at the big cities on the way but just hung out mail on a hook as it blew by us.
Amazing what a nincompoop you are.
Not worth spending even a moment longer here.
Alan on June 22, 2011 11:00 PM
“Amazing what a nincompoop you are.
Not worth spending even a moment longer here.”
Alan has correctly diagnosed this situation.