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Virginia’s
Summer of (political) Discontent over HB3202 and
its unconstitutional “fee” system for
punishing only in-state, politically incorrect
drivers, points to a much deeper problem :Virginia
motorists have long accepted a highway police
state, an arbitrarily socialist system that
punishes good driving while rewarding
incompetence. It treats all drivers as idiots and
criminals and casts driving as a “privilege.”
You
cannot live in today’s world without driving.
How can it be a privilege? Driving is too
necessary to be taken away at the whim of
dictatorial police and judges.
Virginians
can and must overturn this system and treat
driving as a right, and insist on respectful
treatment as “customers” rather than pawns.
The customer is always right.
Since
the advent of the automobile, politicians have
used it as a cash cow and a means of cowing the
public. They proclaimed it a public nuisance. They
sold the public on the lie that drivers are
incompetent and wicked. Drivers are assumed
guilty, micro-managed by distant politicians,
bureaucrats, highway designers, traffic police and
judges. Neo-puritan shame is attached to the
notion that “speed kills” which is, in fact, a
lie. Only collisions kill.
No
account is made of the fact that most of us are
not suicidal nor addicted to booze or drugs, but
are reasonably competent and usually treat each
other with respect. Our laws take no account for
the fact that most of us are equal to cops in
driving skills and judgment. Nor do laws make
adequate distinction between the truly dangerous
— like drunks, and people who drive faster than
arbitrarily low speed limits.
Nor
do laws and enforcement get at the most common
hazards, incompetent and slow drivers and left
lane hoggers — especially trucks. It is rare to
see a driver going so fast as to be a hazard, yet
in every trip you make you are held up by slow
drivers.
Laws
and highways are designed to reward incompetence
(most speed limits are too low), the legal climate
presumes guilt, and police and judges are awarded
superior class privilege, supposedly alone capable
of judging good driving — even from a remote
courtroom.
The
knowledge that laws are enforced more for cash and
power than safety creates cynicism. Bad laws,
badly enforced create distrust of all law. This is
not a recipe for positive political engagement and
maintaining freedom. Why vote, when the system is
fixed?
When
I was a kid cops were heroes.
Then
I got a car.
Your
papers please!
Cops
who protect us from the tiny minority who are drug
dealers, murderers and rapists are sill heroes.
But politicians have corrupted policing by making
it an agency for policing the general public. They
have made them into thugs. Police round up the
public with arbitrary “road checks” which
yield but a few real miscreants while threatening
and inconveniencing thousands of motorists.
Now
we keep giving them more tools, radar and more
sophisticated speed detection, spy planes and
unmanned cameras — while in Virginia the
motorist is even denied radar detectors to
exercise the right to know he is being spied on.
Who
gave cops and judges sole ability to judge driving
ability?
Surely
not the Constitution.
The
very idea of a police force was unknown to the
framers of either the U.S. or Virginia
constitutions and Bills of Rights. They would have
seen the nearly on million “sworn in” federal,
state, and local police as equivalent to a
“standing army” in our midst. When our
Declaration of Independence talks about a
“swarm” of government officials “eating out
our substance” it is talking about police powers
run amok.
The
few constables, sheriffs and prison guards we had
in the early republic were acknowledged necessary
due to a handful of wicked people outside the
law— not for the regulation of the citizen.
Driving
is a right, not a privilege.
Virginia
drivers should be treated
with respect. Most traffic laws must be advisory
rather than arbitrary.
Drivers
can better see whether it is safe to “speed”
than some distant judge. We should demand a
constitutional amendment to make driving a right
and cops our servants — not our masters.
Like
all rights the right to drive can and should be
taken away for bad behavior. But the motorist must
have all the rights accorded any common criminal
unlike his treatment in today’s kangaroo traffic
courts.
--
September 17, 2006
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