Every 1 in 1,000 libertarians seems to realize bicycles are good even according to their principles and then you get a post like this.
If you don’t know Hickman, I think he’d best be described as a sort of primitivist-nostalgic liberterian for settler times in the USA. To fulfill his dreams he moved out into the boonies of upstate new york and ever so often hates how it’s full of uncultured swine, by his definition.
. . . and that’s why it’s essential to remove the State’s requirements for driver’s licensure, automobile registration, emissions checks, . . . .
what’s next, a license to make toast in my own damn toaster?
is it
i’m ventriloquizing what would be the obvious, marginally more clever, libertarian line of thinking.
Unironically yes. At least the current emission checks are levied against individuals, when it’s manufacturers who should be watched. And it’s far, far, FAR better for the environment to drive an old car into the ground than to buy a new one with fewer immediate emissions. Not to mention the fact that fuel efficiency isn’t even taken into account, so you could burn 2/3 the gas in the first place, but still required to take your vehicle off the road. Current emission regulation sucks ass, and is exactly backwards.
Driver’s licenses are also a joke. They are ridiculously easy to get, to the point where it’s difficult to imagine anyone deciding to get on the road and risk their lives if they wouldn’t be able to pass the tests. And registration is just a way for the cops to find you; not helpful at all.
On this one, the “libertarians” (propertarians) are correct. At least in the status quo implementation of these things.
(We drive on the correct side of the road to avoid dying, not because the state makes us do so. Also, as with so many things, the reason we can’t take care of shit ourselves and are “stuck” begging the state to do so is that it violently prohibits community solutions to problems.)
I do like the phrase “Propertarians” for the right-wing Gadsden flag crowd.
I think we could get rid of most of this stuff without significant blowback if we reduce the speed limits.
Yep. And the way to actually reduce those speeds (limits) is to physically shape the roads, not post new numbers on the side of them. Just make it infeasible to drive fast. Reduce lane sizes, create visual and physical barriers that make drivers drive “more defensively” (of their own vehicles and safety), physically divide/protect pedestrians and bicycles, etc.
Where we are going we don’t need lanes