So motorcycles are small, easy to park even in urban conditions, and quite fuel-efficient which is supposedly a virtue in these carbon-sensitive times. 'What's the issue?', you might ask.
Socialism. It's socialism that means you can't ride motorcycles.
Since every European Union country has socialized medicine, it’s clear that the cost of traffic accidents is borne by society, not by individual drivers or riders. In absolute terms, cars are responsible for 10 times the accident costs of motorcycles, €210 billion for cars versus €21 billion for bikes. But, on a passenger-kilometer basis, bikes incur triple the accident costs of cars (€0.127 for motorcycles versus €0.045 for cars).Seems easy enough to fix: don't pay out if I get hurt riding my bike, leave me to sort that via private insurance. That's what we do here in the good old USA, right?
But no: they will answer that they have a moral duty to care for me if I'm hurt, so they therefore have a corresponding moral duty to prevent me from doing things that might get me hurt. Freedom? That's just another word for not accepting my duty to the state and society.
It's worth watching this old Hells Angels documentary from the early 1980s all the way through. Read it with the post below about how the establishment has moved gangsters from anti-heroes to heroes. That's not completely true, but it's not completely wrong either. At one point their lawyers suggest that they're basically Goldwater Republicans, philosophically. At another, they themselves declare that they're quintessentially American, because America is the only place that would take them. Of course there's plenty of rough edges, which to their credit they don't try to hide.
At some point it's going to be us against the bureaucrats and technocrats who want to govern every inch of our lives. I know which side I'm on.
Especially after reading the update, these people are literally beyond parody. From the videos of liberals shaking and crying while holding a firearm, and speaking of the terror they experience even being around an inert device, I literally could not make up a mocking scenario which they themselves had not seriously propagated.
ReplyDeleteThey transpose their own phobias onto the world at large, and state definitively, "nothing good can come from this, it all must go." Well their fears do not give them or anyone a right to infringe on my rights. And given their utter terror at firearms, I seriously wonder how they expect to carry out their "will to power" (I mean, I understand that they believe that the military and police CAN and WOULD enforce their will... I just don't see how they can actually believe that).
"I know which side I'm on." "Me Too". :)
ReplyDeleteThey better ban horseback riding, too...maybe not so many fatalities, but a lot of serious accidents that cost a lot of money to treat. (Think there might be a *class* factor in favor of this activity versus, say, motorcycling?)
ReplyDeleteAlso, what about Sex....STDs can be expensive to treat. Better have an absolute ban on any non-monogamous sexual activity.
Mountain climbing?...best be restricted to easy trails that have been marked out in advance by government experts, with steps added at any tricky points.
What else?
I kind of like the idea of my car culture being ungovernable.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
Guard rails on the mountain trails, too. Wouldn't want anyone to risk falling.
ReplyDeleteI kind of like the idea of my car culture being ungovernable.
Exactly. There's a lot of freedom in older cars, pre-computer. Motorcycles typically still have that aspect. You can fix almost everything yourself; literally everything, if you're willing to invest in a few things like a hydraulic lift and an engine hoist.
No real need for governance.
By the way, check out Car Kulture Deluxe. It says "Not your old man's car magazine," but that's wrong: I used to buy a subscription for my father, who grew up in the great era of the American automobile. He knew how to work on pretty much everything they showed in their pages. Hot rods, muscle cars, classic cars with flame paint jobs... it was what he grew up with, and it's still pretty cool.
Guard rails on the mountain trails, too. Wouldn't want anyone to risk falling.
ReplyDeleteWell, if you're going to worry about falling, you need a governor on motorcycle engine speed and outrigger--aka training--wheels on your motorcycle, too.
Eric Hines
I need that exactly as much as I need guard rails on mountain trails, yes.
ReplyDeleteLet me tell you, interpret things like this as absurd at your own peril. For perspective, I worked in Kazakhstan, the Former Soviet Union just a few years after Glasnost. If you think an objection to motorcycles is extreme, what would you say about a primarily agrarian economy where ownership of buckets was strictly controlled, eh? Yes: Buckets. Because you see, if you have a bucket, you can carry things with it, without getting approvals. Yes, it can get that bad, and it has been before, in our lifetime. I lost a few hundred thousand dollars in high-priced specialized oilfield cementing chemicals from a rail siding just across from the Ukraine. You know why? They wanted the 5 gallon plastic buckets, that's why, and were willing to risk the worst kind of draconian prisons (or death) to get them. The chemicals were poured out on the rail bed.
ReplyDelete" They wanted the 5 gallon plastic buckets, that's why, and were willing to risk the worst kind of draconian prisons (or death) to get them. "
ReplyDeleteThey wanted buckets, but what they needed was rifles.
My father predicted this stuff many years ago, ie, as soon as they decide societal cost (in this case medical cost) outweighs freedom, they can ban anything. It was one of his arguments against seat belt laws.
They wanted buckets, but what they needed was rifles.
ReplyDeleteAmen to that.
E Hines said...
ReplyDeleteI kind of like the idea of my car culture being ungovernable.
We're not supposed to be governed. We are the government.
Aggie, re the 5-gallon buckets:
ReplyDelete"Red Plenty" is an interesting book about the people who actually had to try to make Soviet top-down economic planning *work*....factory managers, planners, computer scientists, fixers. One of the latter was a man who had been a salesman before the Revolution...now, his work was getting businesses the supplies they needed to operate, via a combination of charm, favor-trading, and (probably) outright bribery. He made the point that in a capitalist economy, the hard thing is trying to get people to buy the things you make; in a socialist economy, the problem is trying to get people to provide you with the things that *they* make.
I kind of like the idea of my car culture being ungovernable.
ReplyDeleteWe're not supposed to be governed. We are the government.
Ungovernable. I don't need to govern your car, nor do you mine.
And, no, we don't live in a Rousseau-ian nation. Our government is separate from us and explicitly subordinate to us.
Eric Hines
I could see either side of that argument. On the one hand, the government is created by the People and may be dissolved by the People. So the People are prior to, and superior to, the government.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the citizen is also an officer of the state. It is the citizen's office to, inter alia, serve on juries to bless off on state use of force against fellow citizens; serve in the militia as the most basic defense of the free state, as for example by being armed in all places and times so as to harden the society against mass shooters or terrorists or simple criminals; and, if the People use their sovereign power to elect to dissolve the government, to serve in the disbanding of it.
Maybe the issue is distinguishing the People, as separate sovereign, from the citizenry, who are officers of the state. It's the same human beings, but it's two different functions.
the People, as separate sovereign, from the citizenry, who are officers of the state.
ReplyDeleteCertainly, and that distinction, artificial as it might seem, is just the one I was drawing. Rousseau made no such distinction; he held that, properly, the government and the people were one and the same, with no separation at all.
Eric Hines
@ David Foster. Or skiing. Yachting. Sailing. Very dangerous sports. We should regulate them, no?
ReplyDeleteAs for the motorcycles, this is because they have already virtually eliminated pickup trucks. My son in Norway assures me that the registration fees and permissions are so expensive that people just don't bother - even if they were willing to endure the social stigma.
They haven't come for the snowmobiles yet, though.