The effort to mandate drunk-driver detectors that can disable vehicles is a sign of things to come.
The effort to mandate drunk-driver detectors that can disable vehicles is a sign of things to come.
T he Biden administration has started the year with 38 new final rules and 19 proposed rules in just one week. According to the American Action Forum, this included 854 pages of regulations carrying an estimated cost of $1.1 billion, with one of the most important being the CARS Rule (Combating Auto Retail Scams Rule). Although, if President Biden wants to combat auto-retail scams, perhaps he should start by looking at the electric-car incentives in his own Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to convince you to buy a car you don’t like at a price you can’t afford.
Some of the new regulations are reasonable — but many others will further restrict individual freedom, the principal casualty of the accumulation of laws over time. Like Colombian philosopher Nicolas Gómez Dávila once said: “Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.” American society isn’t dying, but it’s consuming more and more of this poisonous “remedy.”
One of the new proposals, originating in a 2021 law, is a good example: concerning “Advanced Impaired Driving Prevention Technology.” It is a paradigmatic case of the government’s inefficiency when it insists on regulating everything. According to the Federal Register, this step “initiates rulemaking that would gather the information necessary to develop performance requirements and require that new passenger motor vehicles be equipped with advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.” Under the plan, all new cars will eventually be required to include a device to monitor the driver to detect if he or she is drunk and, if so, disable the car.
Democrats have defended this in Congress by declaring that too many innocent people are killed by drunk drivers, and that this must be stopped.
The law, however, alludes to a technology that has not been developed, while proposing a solution that should not exist. Who is the government to turn off your car without your permission through the assessment of a third party? (Although, one could see the utility in forcing lawmakers to carry their own BS detectors, to shut them down immediately as soon as they start talking or legislating nonsense.) Obviously, more questions arise: Since when can the government monitor every second of your driving life? And more: What will happen when you’re, say, driving a relative to the hospital in an emergency, the car misinterprets your nervousness behind the wheel as drunkenness, it shuts down, and your relative dies?
The list of questions about this proposed rule is endless, but that’s a debate for another time. More to the point, these types of regulations keep appearing because the United States for too long has cultivated an environment in which suffocating hyper-regulation thrives. Although Republicans at times have contributed to this, it is primarily a Democratic project: The Left continues to believe that the government is daddy and the citizens are his children, too stupid and helpless to get through life without his heavy hand.
Hyper-regulation, inevitably, increases public spending, discourages investment, creates legal uncertainty for businesses, discourages consumers, and makes even the simplest procedure a bureaucratic hell.
Not so long ago, the United States was an example of restraint as it pertains to the size of government. There was a certain consensus that government intervention should be minimal, because individuals can be trusted more than the government to make their decisions. Today, however, America seems to be following the regulatory path of the EU, which has fallen into unprecedented disrepute among citizens, precisely because of the immense bureaucratic tangle it has created. You can’t so much as scratch your cheek in Europe without first consulting European, national, regional, county, municipal, and neighborhood regulations.
The suffocation of European laws has severely damaged entire sectors, including livestock farming, whose practitioners are now beginning to join protests across the continent against “green regulations” that hamper their already precarious livelihoods. A significant portion of the regulations that are most undermining freedom in the United States also are the result of green policies, which are sold to citizens with the assurance that they track with a broad international consensus. There is no such consensus. Just crazed elites throwing extra obstacles in the way of an already-difficult recovery from the economic chasm left by the coronavirus.
It is almost impossible for the Left to be able to quit its regulatory meddling, because, let us not forget, without government interference, the Left does not exist. The opposite is true for the Right. That is why it is important that the contemporary conservative discourse, in the United States and Europe, is firmly committed to pursuing deregulation and the elimination of absurd rules. We already know that this will result in the Left accusing us of wanting to incentivize alcohol-caused traffic accidents. But idiot drivers will always find a way to wreak havoc on the roads; if stupidity could be extinguished by a law, we would have passed it a long time ago.