QUOTABLE Mankind's "most liberating invention" is the car (and it needs road) Stephen Moore has a splendid op-ed "The War against the Car" in the Wall Street Journal today from which we excerpt: "(T)he automobile is one of the two most liberating inventions of the past century, ranking only behind the microchip. The car allowed even the common working man total freedom of mobility - the means to go anywhere, anytime, for any reason. In many ways, the automobile is the most egalitarian invention in history, dramatically bridging the quality-of-life gap between rich and poor. The car stands for individualism; mass transit for collectivism.
Soviet film showing US cars backfired "Philosopher Waldemar Hanasz, who grew up in communist Poland, noted in his 1999 essay Engines of Liberty that Soviet leaders in the 1940s showed the movie The Grapes of Wrath all over the country as propaganda against the evils of U.S. capitalism and the oppression of farmers. The scheme backfired because 'far from being appalled, the Soviet viewers were envious; in America, it seemed, even the poorest had cars and trucks'...
Perverse obsession with conserving instead of producing "A perverse logic has taken hold among the intelligentsia that progress can be measured by how much of the earth's fuels we save, when in fact the history of human economic advancement, dating back to the invention of the wheel, has been defined by our ability to substitute technology and energy use for the planet's one truly finite resource: human energy.
"It is because we have continually found inventive ways to harness the planet's energy sources at ever-declining costs - through such sinister inventions as the car -- that the average American today produces what 200 men could before the industrial revolution began. Studies confirm that the more, not less, energy a nation uses and the more, not fewer, cars that it has, the more productive the workers, the richer the society, and the healthier the citizens as measured by life expectancy...
Cars saved more lives in Katrina than all the relief agencies "If the no-car-garage had been a reality in New Orleans in August, we wouldn't have suffered 1,000 Katrina fatalities, but 10,000 or more. The automobile, especially those dreaded all-terrain four-wheel drive SUVs (ideal for driving through floodwaters) saved more lives during the Katrina disaster than all the combined relief efforts of FEMA, local police and fire squads, churches, the Salvation Army and the Red Cross...
Rosa Parks campaign depended on privately owned cars "This month we paid honor to the heroism of Rosa Parks for fighting racism through the bus boycott in Montgomery. What helped sustain that historic freedom cause was that hundreds of blacks owned cars and trucks that they used to carpool others around the city...
Let all Sierraclubbists surrender their cars for the social good but... "To be sure, if the entire membership of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace surrendered their cars, the world and the highways might very well be a better place. But for the rest of us the car is indispensable - it is our exoskeleton. There's a perfectly good reason that the roads are crammed with tens of millions of cars and that Americans drive eight billion miles a year while spurning buses, trains, bicycles and subways. Americans are rugged individualists who don't want to cram aboard buses and subways.
"We want more open roads and highways, and we want energy policies that will make gas cheaper, not more expensive. We want to travel down the road from serfdom and the car is what will take us there."
