Bootlickers Want YOU Out of Your Car

Eric Peters, a car enthusiast in Virginia, wrote on Sept 7, 2018, about something that's been gnawing at me too:

The average cost for insurance for a new teen driver is now north of $250 per month.

How is he supposed to get a car – or afford gas – when he is obliged to pony up $250 each month to the insurance mafia? ... How is a teenage kid working a minimum wage/part-time gig supposed to deal with it?

Faced with this extortion – and that’s exactly the right word; there’s no choice about paying the $250 per month, if the kid wants to drive legally – many simply opt out. A record-high percentage of 16-25-year-olds haven’t even got a driver’s license and forget the car. They stay home instead, game and text. When they need to get somewhere, they ride share or Uber or something that doesn’t require them to spend a minimum of 20-25 hours working at minimum wage (currently $10.50 er hour) gig hauling pizzas or some such just to tithe the mafia.... More and more of them just don’t care about cars – or driving.

Mission accomplished.

One way to get people out of cars – an agenda that has existed since at least the early ’70s in furtive “urban planning” circles but which has become aggressively obvious in recent years – is to make sure they never get into them. And the easiest way to do that is to make driving prohibitively and unavoidably expensive for new drivers especially. If they never learn to drive, they’ll never miss not driving.

I agree with Eric Peters that the dramatic increases in the cost of insuring new drivers is INTENTIONAL on the part of bureaucrats. It is government policy that allows insurance companies to do this. Just one of those policies is mandatory insurance -- which is nothing more than a massive subsidy to rent-seeking insurance companies.

It's many times more expensive to repair accident-damaged cars now than it was at the peak of Car Culture USA. That is again a direct result of federal policy: Cars must be built to federal standards, rather than customer standards. So what might have been a fender, hood, and grille replacement in 1968, now requires dozens of large and small parts, each one engineered to comply with federal crash standards, air bag systems (required by the feds), and crumple-zone standards -- and each one predictably pricey as a result.

Not long ago, there was an article in a car magazine where a GM engineer was reviewing past GM greats -- like the 1966 Chevrolet Malibu.  He said his department had actually studied the idea: that with the identical manufacturing, engineering, and features as one had in 1966, the same identical car would cost a buyer around $15,000 in today's dollars.

He also said that with modern regulation, all of the changes to every part of the car to comply with current regulations, you'd end up with a car that was almost unrecognizable, twice the weight, about the same power, and roughly three times the cost -- and either impossible to repair or horrendously expensive to repair.

The Murderous Left wants people out of cars. The single greatest liberator of all time -- the personal automobile -- is anathema to bootlickers who want to know who you are, where you are, what you're doing, who you're with, and what you have in your possession. AT ALL TIMES.

Bootlickers are control freaks who want the unwashed masses shuttled around in cattle cars that they can centrally shut down for whatever reason, and grab who or whatever they want.

They don't give a rat's ass about the environment, or deaths and injuries from accidents. All they are really after is CONTROL. And one way to get there is to make mobility-at-will all but impossible.

The Libertarian answer is to:

1) Abolish mandatory insurance requirements, like all other regulations

2) Abolish all government-issued identification regimes.

3) Eliminate all government-owned or operated transportation systems, and allow private ownership to mitigate the harm done by poor drivers.

4) Abolish government-operated police, and allow road owners to provide the kind of traffic control that suits them and their paying customers.

------------------------------------------------------------
Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
------------------------------------------------------------
Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, September, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

------------------------------------------------------------
For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
------------------------------------------------------------

NY: Subways Stolen!

The subject of the NY subway system is a fascinating read that shows the true greed and hypocrisy of government-run operations.

The private NY mass transit operators were driven out of business in the 20s to 40's by government edict.

The tools used were regulatory -- denials of permits for infrastructure maintenance, denial of permits for expansion to new areas, a cap on fares of 5 cents, and other tactics.

The federal government prints money -- and as it prints more and more of it to cover deficit spending, the cash becomes worth less and less. This phenomenon was happening with federal money in the 1930's, just as it is today. With their nickel fares being eroded in value by federal inflation and the refusal of the city government to permit the companies to raise fares or do just about anything else, the handwriting was on the wall.

How long could **you** run a business if you could only charge one price for your product or service?  For the 42 years since the first subway opened in 1904 the fare had remained a nickel -- by law.

It is by no means a rare occurrence for governments to slaughter the golden goose in this way. For example, Vladimir Putin stole an oil empire from the private sector using the state's monopoly on force and handed the empire over to close political cronies at fire-sale prices.

Something very similar happened in New Jersey just a few years ago (late nineties), in the insurance business: wildly unpredictable, out of line liability awards made insurance in several industries impossible to write. The state government limited premiums on the front end, and allowed outlandish awards on the other. When insurance companies began to lose their shirts, and some began closing their NJ operations, the NJ government quickly stepped in with a law prohibiting the insurers from leaving the state -- so many went bankrupt instead.

Another similar tactic was used by the New York bureaucracy with regard to the subway system.

Check out the sanitized version of the story on the Metropolian Transit Authority's website.  Example: "Around the time the Independent was first conceived, in 1920, there was severe overcrowding on the subways. They were victims of their own success. The word "unification" was very politically correct during this time. The idea behind unification was to have the City of New York buy out the privately owned Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) Corporation. On April 25th, 1921, the New York Transit Commission was formed to develop a plan to resolve the overcrowding and delays on the current lines in any manner it saw fit, including "recapturing" existing lines from the privately owned rapid transit subway and elevated lines."


[NOTE: Links in the above paragraph were added by this author.]

"Recapturing" is bureaucratese for "stealing".

Notice the sleight-of-hand there?  The bureaucrats assume everything belongs to The State, and you only get title to it by the good graces of ... bureaucrats.  Because if you're not in their good graces, they get to "recapture" whatever they "loaned" to you.

There is a fairly good Wikipedia article about the shady history of the government takeover of the private transit system.

The "progressive" pols of New York from the twenties to the forties followed a well-worn path to seize the private subway and elevated train operators.  And other forms of mass transit.

One of the politicians, Mayor Hylan (also see this), a Democrat, involved in bankrupting the transit companies had earlier been fired from one of the subway companies. Once in a position to do so, he wrought his revenge - big time.

If the subways were crowded, then they were profitable! Thus, the city could have allowed the PRIVATE companies to build more lines. Instead, they put up the Independent (IND) lines in direct competition - right UNDER them - the 6th Avenue subway was put right under the 6th Avenue El and the Fulton Street subway in Brooklyn was put right UNDER the Fulton Street El.

Now, if there was a need for more subway & elevated lines, why not build them in other places not yet covered (for example, 5th Avenue or 10th Avenue?).  In fact, on the East Side of Manhattan, there were 3 IRT owned lines : Lexington, 3rd Av, and 2nd Av - back in 1921.  Now, under GOVERNMENT ownership to "relieve overcrowding", there is just the Lexington!  Transportation bond issues to raise money for another 2nd Av line came about in 1946, 1967, the 1970;s, etc. and were passed - but no subway line was built.  What the government was very good at was TEARING DOWN existing lines (and selling the scrap to our ally Japan who used it on Pearl Harbor).

After tearing down lines, the city then used the Maintenance budget as a slush fund.  The politicians became tools of the unions and paid ridiculous contracts.  "Chic" politicians like John Vliet Lindsay and his ilk encouraged graffiti "artistes" for a while.  As a "public accomodation", they were not allowed to remove winos, bums, beggars, etc. who slept and stunk up the subways.  After hitting rock bottom about 1980, there has been a little bit of a resurgence but more and more people take cars into Manhattan.

One of the few lines built by the City in the last 50 years was a tunnel from 63rd Street Manhattan into Queens that dead ends in Queens with no connections - not even to Queens Plaza a mile away - something like $2,000,000,000 for a tunnel to nowhere!


Mass transit was evolving naturally before government got involved.   The death of it was largely coincident with government interference.  its rebirth as a socialist government enterprise is fraught with waste and delay.  Any student of economics should study the history of mass transit in America -- especially with regard to subways -- if he wants a good picture of the corrupting hand of government.


For additional reading on the topic, here are a few links:


1.  "Subway Hijinks", by Gregory Bresiger, on Mises.org.

2.  "Subway Tax in the Rancid Apple ",  by Gregory Bresiger, on Mises.org.

Go Green: Why Should Richmond Subsidize Pollution Anyway?

Many area residents have followed the story of the government workers in the city of Richmond who have been double-dipping for their official-business transportation. I don't know the details of all this -- perhaps their pay stubs don't show the transportation reimbursement as a separate component, in which case it doesn't occur to them they were getting it. I don't pay much attention to each line item on my pay stub, either.

I don't particularly care, either way, because whether or not they were double-dipping is just window dressing. The best way to prevent problems like this is simply to eliminate their jobs.

But if Richmond taxpayers simply can't live without government workers interfering in their everyday life, perhaps the next best solution is for government employees to be required to use the same transportation system for their commuting & official business as they force all taxpayers to subsidize: The Bus. Employees should be given free tokens to do so, and should have to pay an "impact fee" if they choose to drive anyway.

According to the Virginia Employment Commission, there are 10,840 employees who get a city of Richmond paycheck. Interestingly, Richmond's own budget website says there are only 8,493. Must be some secret agents in there somewhere.

Besides the fact that not a single one of these folks produces new wealth to ultimately enrich everyone, how many have cars they have to park downtown? Let's say half of all employees work downtown, or about 5,000. Including hizzoner. Few of them carpool -- spend ten minutes marveling at the aggressive driving during the commuting hour and while doing so, observe how few cars are carrying more than one person. So, let's say there are 4,500 spaces taken up by Richmond government workers' cars every day.

At the same time, many in government will happily regurgitate the garbage science of anthropomorphic climate change; hypocritically while they are collecting fat bonuses to subsidize their trifling meddling around town and unspecified activities at cheap hotels. Here's where the rubber should meet the road. If government is going to force-feed the poison of discouraging private resource use and emissions, it should be the first to "go green". It should set the good example, rather than be the poster child for "do as I say, not as I do". Government employees should all be required to use GRTC (or ride a bike, or walk) to go from their homes as well as to go to and from all official-business appointments.

Think of how this will open up downtown to productive uses. Businesses require available parking at low cost to be able to produce wealth for the government to tax. Shoppers who used to avoid downtown will find thousands of welcoming parking spaces so they can do business with a thriving commercial area, rather than thousands of government workers' cars crowding them out.

Think also of other potential benefits. One would be that increased biking or walking will improve city workers' health. Better health means lower costs to the city for health insurance. Another would be the fact that thousands of government worker's cars taken off the roads will reduce the demand for fuel. Reduced demand means downward pressure on gas prices - a good thing for everyone.

Government employees generally accomplish little but the looting of the productive private sector. For that reason, their impact on society should be minimized or eliminated wherever possible. With one little change, the city of Richmond can re-open the commercial district, support its own bus service, and eliminate several million tons of emissions its workers inject into the atmosphere every day -- and lower the tax rate due to lower costs.

Later, we can move on to eliminating 29,449 state workers' and 5,942 federal workers' cars from the streets as well.

*************************************************************

Marc Montoni lives in Henrico County with his family and serves as a member of the Libertarian Party State Committee. He is a network consultant and writer who often contributes to the city of Richmond's tax revenue by patronizing city establishments.