"But enforceable arbitrary speed limits are a moral affront because they are no different than any other arbitrary rule - and laws ought to be premised on moral right/moral wrong.
It's obviously wrong to just walk up to someone and hit them – and the law proscribing (and punishing) this when done is morally correct. Everyone understands this. We have a victim – someone who has been harmed. And we have a deliberate act, an intent to harm.
These are the basic elements of a crime.
Breaking a rule is not a crime - and treating a rule-breaker as a criminal is tyrannical. The rule-breaker who is punished becomes the victim of the government – that is to say, the busybodies and control freaks who constitute 'the government' – are the criminals."
It's obviously wrong to just walk up to someone and hit them – and the law proscribing (and punishing) this when done is morally correct. Everyone understands this. We have a victim – someone who has been harmed. And we have a deliberate act, an intent to harm.
These are the basic elements of a crime.
Breaking a rule is not a crime - and treating a rule-breaker as a criminal is tyrannical. The rule-breaker who is punished becomes the victim of the government – that is to say, the busybodies and control freaks who constitute 'the government' – are the criminals."
I've written extensively about this very premise myself. But Eric writes in such a way that it's impressively concise and easy to grasp, which is a rare and wonderful skill.
In other car news, I haven't looked up this study in detail to see if it's reliable or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if their math was correct. A conventional car is "internal combustion". It combusts just enough energy from pseudo-refined raw material as needed to propel only itself. Whereas an electric car is "external combustion", meaning the energy is produced/combusted at a mass scale within a power plant, then shipped to and stored in batteries within the car. Plus with a normal car, power is converted directly to horsepower-- other than the alternator, it doesn't need the intermediate conversion step to electricity.
Based on that model, my knowledge of business and physics tells me that having hundreds of pounds of batteries per car, which need to be manufactured and which weigh down the car, is significantly uneconomical. On the flip-side, I wonder what the CO2 emissions are for gas refining? Also, I wonder if there are "division of labor" and "economies of scale" efficiencies by mass producing energy in one central place, versus everyone doing it themselves? I just don't know enough about the problem yet to say for sure which principles outweigh the others here.
Or maybe none of this matters anyway, since young people often don't buy cars anyway! And I don't really blame them: as much as I love my 350z and wifey's WRX, cutting that $1800 insurance check once every year is painful, as are the $150 oil changes. Interestingly though, there isn't a day which goes by where both of my kids ask me when I can start teaching them to drive-- it's one of the things in life for which they're the most excited. So they'll undoubtedly buck the trends of their generation!