I was driving down Lamar on Monday when I heard a radio ad produced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). State authorities, the narrator explained, enforce the “Click It Or Ticket” law because it keeps us safe and our families from dealing with our untimely demise.
I thought immediately of an earlier exchange with a friend regarding federal laws that require car manufacturers to provide seat belts. Though I argued that seat belt-equipped cars may have become more popular through free market competition just as fuel-efficient Japanese sedans did during the OPEC embargo, I conceded that such laws are “reasonable.”
“Click It Or Ticket,” on the other hand, seems to me like a blatant infringement of my responsibility not to do stupid things that jeopardize my life. I mustn’t be so narrow-minded, the ad insisted, for such libertarianism didn’t just threaten me. My family was also a stakeholder in the decision. The ad did not clarify just what, by this logic, is preventing police officers from writing me a ticket for eating pizza two nights in a row or having a toffee-nut iced coffee with lunch as well as breakfast or engaging in any number of other actions that plausibly foreshorten my life.
What is “reasonable” is very much up for debate when it comes to progressive legislation.
John Daniel Davidson, senior correspondent for the Federalist, has written about the effect that the Austin City Council’s recent measure requiring Uber and Lyft to fingerprint their drivers has had on the local ride-sharing economy. A job fair sponsored by the city encouraged drivers to begin working for GetMe, a service that complies with the Council’s regulations. I would be surprised at the city government’s blithe willingness to pick winners and losers in the economy if the Clinton administration and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan hadn’t done the same thing with homebuilders before the subprime mortgage crisis.
Drivers and riders, Davidson writes, have circumvented the city’s onerous regulations. Arcade City, a New Hampshire-based company that connects riders with drivers who have been “community-vetted” by a “ratings system” (much as Uber drivers were) has entered the fray. Hilariously, the city demanded that Arcade City drivers not charge their riders “beyond the federal reimbursement rate of $0.54 a mile.” This is to say nothing of the City Council’s attempt to penalize homeowners who rent their home for less than 30 days. (Apparently Airbnb irritates Mayor Adler as much as Uber.)
Austin bureaucrats are determined that city government should usurp–or at least expedite–the role of competition.
The justification for these infringements of property rights and freedom of contract lies in the “reasonableness” of the new regulations. Fingerprinting isn’t “onerous,” champions of the new measure insist. It’s a good way to ensure the safety of riders. Never mind that the safety of riders was not previously a concern and that Uber drivers already have to undergo a criminal background check.
As Kevin Williamson writes in regard to the TSA, proponents of buraeucracy are perfectly satisfied with the appearance of efficiency, even when it fails 95 percent of the time. And as David R. Henderson writes in regard to Paul Krugman’s belief in “predistribution,” prominent proponents of bureaucracy are willing to overlook measures that undermine an employee’s ability to negotiate their pay so long as they can be construed as addressing “income inequality.”
It seems to me that the purported “reasonableness” of new regulations is distracting people from the degree to which our conception of government has fundamentally changed since the Founding, when James Madison defined government’s responsibility to manage foreign affairs, regulate international commerce, and protect property. Short of restraining other citizens from causing me bodily harm and combating foreign threats, it’s not the government’s responsibility to provide for my safety.
The Southern Unionist 