Driving Reign

Some “lifestyle” choices are superior to others and your government is more than willing to tell you which ones it plans to advance by writ of law.  Case in point, congressman James Oberstar D-MN, has offered up the Surface Transportation Authorization act (STAA).  STAA is a wet spot on the bed of comrade Transportation minister Ray LaHood who’s intention [is] to "coerce" Americans out of their cars and [who] has defined "livability" as "being able to take your kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, drop by the grocery or post office, go out to dinner and a movie, and play with your kids in the park, all without having to get into your car."   

So much for parking at the local make out spot an exercising your reproductive freedom. 

This redefinition of ‘livability'  would require (According to Heritage.org) an additional 150 to 200 billion in transportation related taxes (gas taxes) for the purpose of moving American’s away from their obsession with automobiles and into mass transit.  It would also favor commercial development in higher density urban areas where trains, trolleys, and bicycles would be the preferred form of transport over those evil SUV’s that the right wing theocratic baby-makers use so they and their resource abusing brats can stomp their carbon foot-prints all over the fruited plain.

The only way this will work of course is if the central planners take your tax dollars and make your life miserable and intractable so that you have to move closer to an urban area.  Here’s a hammer.  Go ahead and hit me with it.  Sounds loke a stretch, but then so does forcing people to buy things under threat of criminal prosecution and that has already passed the House.

Automobiles are touchy business.  They represent a form of freedom and mobility that runs contrary to central planning and social engineering’s goal of making you need the federal government.  People in urban areas rely on publicly (government) funded infrastructure.  They tend to vote democrat.  So when threats of game changing EPA pollution standards, excessive fuel economy requirements, transportation regulations that tie states hands to federal hand outs, and buying up automobile companies becomes the new black, a not-so complex plot to facilitate government forced urbanization is not and unrealistic notion.   And since your government wants to buy up or cordon off the landscape as federally protected(even if it doesn’t have cheap abundant energy ferreted away underneath it), or could abuse eminent domain to abscond it, (all to shield it from human use in larger and larger chunks), when you can’t use it or live on it, where you gonna go? 

STAA is just another piece of the central planners puzzle.  It uses the power of your tax dollars to redefine the commercial and transportation landscape to favor urban over rural development, which favors big central planning government.  And they don't much care what you think is good for you.  We already know that's a fact.