Traffic Control and the State
by Steven Thomas Druckenmiller
When a free and rational people are forced to follow meaningless, principle-less laws in order to conduct their day-to-day business, it is another sad step towards statism. In this vein, I propose that the State, whether with malicious intent or with fumbling ignorance, has conditioned the people to become mindless sheep through the enforcement of traffic regulations and laws.
Starting with an obvious example, the State moved to effectively control every individual life on the road by forcing (through fines and threatened jail time) all motorists to “buckle up”. This, clearly, is the most nakedly aggressive step in traffic control that the State has taken, in addition to the enforcement of so-called “drunk” driving laws. However, the Pavlovian conditioning that exists on our modern road system means laid the groundwork for this aggression.
First, the State demonstrates that its laws are not rooted in principles, but in arbitrariness and nanny-statism. Although certain individuals can, and do, successfully navigate their automobiles with a BAC above what the Government mandates (it is .08% for most states, after the federal government blackmailed the sickeningly spineless legislatures with a threat to revoke their beloved highway money), the State arbitrarily decided that no individual can ever safely operate a motor vehicle with said BAC, despite the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all description for when a given motorist is “impaired”. Factually, it is possible for one 100-pound woman to be impaired in her driving after 3 beers whereas one 180-pound man may not be, and may in fact be a safer driver than certain 90-year-olds that spring to mind. No matter, says the State, our laws say that context is irrelevant. Mouthing platitudes to placate the soccer-mom infested MADD, the politician shamelessly abrogates freedom by stating that the law provides no context. This ignores, of course, the fact that many of our laws dealing with higher crimes differentiate depending on given circumstances (i.e. the differences among robbery, theft and larceny). In fact, it is in the most rudimentary of laws, the ones that govern our everyday lives, as opposed to the laws governing felonies and more serious misdemeanors, that context-dropping and a lack of principles are most prevalent.
Don’t believe me? Although there are contextual laws to deal with higher crimes, ask yourself if the charge of speeding or failure-to-yield at a red light carries some form of context. They do not. Some may ask, what possible context can there (or should there) be for say, running a red light? I maintain that it is entirely arbitrary, unfair and pointless to pull over a motorists who runs through a red light on a traffic-less street at 2 AM, but the law provides no exceptions for this completely reasonable decision. Additionally, speed limits that provide zero context on traffic (heavy or light), road conditions or weather are entirely arbitrary and unfair. If it’s 3AM on the turnpike, why should I not be allowed to choose to go 80mph in a 65? There is absolutely no harm being done to anyone, and if any occurs, then we can determine the facts of the case. However, speed limits are tantamount to prior restraint, and they assume that no one, not even Jeff Gordon, say, can safely operate a motor vehicle above the State’s mystical “65”. As an example, suppose that we replace the idea that "running a red light is illegal" (a current, principle-less law) with "Discharging a shotgun is illegal". When is firing the shotgun illegal? Always, even in self-defense, even in the middle of a 500-acre empty field, even if no one is harmed. That's the principle that is at stake.
Why should the average Objectivist, and any freedom-lover, be concerned about this? Because Big Brother laughs every time a motorist sits needlessly at a red light, not because the motorist chooses to, but because Big Brother says he has to, regardless of personal choice. A red light is a red light, says the government, and you are not adult enough to dare defy the all-holy red light. In addition to being completely offensive to the average rational adult, this disgusting attitude also begins to condition people to accept other limitations of their freedoms without question. After all, what is our first reaction to anything large, lit-up and red? It is to stop, of course, as we have been conditioned to do every single day, without thought to the rhyme or reason. Anyone who does not see something sinister in that kind of reflexive conditioning, or anything scary in the idea that we have laws simply for the sake of having them, is either dangerously foolish or willfully blind. The infusion of Objectivist principles is the only thing to defeat this dangerous context-dropping, and this is why liberty requires rational, contextual principles.
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