Sean C. Morgan
A number of northern and central European towns, some the size of Albany, have done away with traffic regulations.
Their streets lack traffic lights and signs telling drivers how to operate their vehicles.
Shockingly, their accident rates have decreased.
Even those of us who believe that liberty must be the key filter for every action taken by government – every regulation, every law, find it hard to imagine traffic without rules.
Remove laws, and chaos will rule the roadways, right?
Wrong. And it’s not really a miracle.
Maybe this is just what most of us crazy liberty folks have been saying all along: People can successfully make defensible choices on their own without their nanny state telling them how to live, eat, smoke, drink and whatever else.
In Richmond, Va., last week, a committee of legislators killed a bill that would have included vaping in the state’s Clean Indoor Air Act, outlawing vaping in restaurants and other so-called public places. An 8-4 vote, it was a decisive call.
Now that’s a miracle.
But it didn’t happen here in Oregon. Without getting into the massive misinformation campaign spread and probably believed by ideologues of the government- and cigarette-funded public health bureaucrats, our own state rabidly endorsed this move last year.
Seemingly everyone is on board. Rep. Phil Barnhart, who represents the south end of our county, was one of the primary promoters of the bill last year that did the deed, but our own Sherrie Sprenger voted for it. She had to. It was the only way for her to prohibit minors from using e-cigarettes and vape pens.
Funny thing is, Wyoming and many other states have managed to ban teen use without adding all those extra restrictions that Oregon’s legislators couldn’t resist.
Our Sen. Fred Girod, one of the few legislators with an actual medical background (he’s a dentist), voted against the bill when it reached the Senate.
For good measure, the legislature banned vaping in privately owned restaurants regardless of the owners’ preferences, just like it did cigarettes over a decade ago.
A lot of folks cheered when that one went into effect, never mind that most restaurants had already wisely banned smoking in order to provide their non-smoking customers a pleasurable dining experience.
After the prohibition went into effect, restaurants like The Spring here in Sweet Home, where The Swan is now located, disappeared. I don’t know for sure if this was the cause, but I can do the math. The Spring was the place smokers went to smoke and drink coffee. Many non-smokers chose not to go there because it was often filled with smoke.
That’s the market at work. Smokers and non-smokers alike had plenty of places to go have an enjoyable meal.
Today, our state treats vaping like smoking, which is indefensible when serious science is employed. But legislators, bent on “doing the right thing” for the naive and unthinking public, don’t care about that.
They haven’t stopped to consider that vaping without nicotine is a fog machine. A fog machine is an e-cigarette if nicotine is added.
Nicotine is really not much more of a big deal than caffeine; and it doesn’t get exhaled at any level more substantial than eating a tomato. It’s the tar and carbon monoxide and carcinogens released by burning plant material and chemicals that are primarily responsible for killing smokers.
What vaping provides is a way for smokers to get the little hit they need (just like coffee drinkers feel better after ingesting that little bit of caffeine) without all the other poison. There are plenty of people walking around Sweet Home today, including yours truly, who once had a cigarette problem and are no longer coughing. Some have quit nicotine altogether.
But critics – largely public health bureaucrats, who obviously have legislators’ attention, say we don’t know if it’s safe, despite the growing body of actual research-based evidence that contradicts that. Since we don’t know it’s safe, and it sort of looks like a cigarette, they call for restrictions, regulations and taxes.
It’s the same presumptive, meddling, Big-Brother attitude our legislators bring to the minimum wage, land use, commerce, mandatory sick leave and other attempts to legislate a moral utopia.
What’s scary, not just Oregon but elsewhere as well, apparently people are getting used to this and even kind of like it.
Back in Richmond, the Virginia Restaurant, Lodging and Travel Association was actively attempting to limit the private property rights of its own membership by supporting the vaping bill mentioned above that was killed by the legislative committee.
“The law isn’t explicitly clear as to how it treats vapes (e-cigs) and so our restaurant members are left to make that determination for themselves, and certainly they often do,” said Kristian Scales, vice president of government affairs for the association. “They just thought this was a step in the right direction and gave them more clarity.”
Apparently, business and property owners don’t know what to do without a bureaucrat telling them what to do. In a society full of repressive rules that stifle business enterprise, they’re afraid to make a mistake that’s going to cost them. They rely on their government to decide what’s safe, and until a government official gives them the go-ahead, permission and assurances, they don’t want to act.
In European cities that have abolished traffic regulations, the number of accidents have decreased because drivers make better choices. Without one-size-fits-all directions from their centralized rules committees, their governments, they have to pay attention. They have to watch. They have to weigh their options before acting on the road.
They can’t rely on a rule to keep them “safe.” They take more care and make better decisions on their own.
I’ve watched countless drivers blow the stop sign at the intersection of McDowell Creek and Berlin roads. Many of us might curse them for not following the rules. After all, how hard can it be to follow the rules and just stop. I do (and yes, many of you have watched me screw up on the road just like you have). I stop there, but it’s clear that most of the time, no stopping is necessary. The intersection and its approaches are visible at long distances.
I’ll bet everyone in town has the capability of deciding whether to slow down, stop or go through that intersection safely, regardless of the stop sign, and many simply just make that choice anyway. It happens when the electricity goes off and we don’t have lights.
When we call upon our legislators and our government to fix our neighbors and friends, it costs us all long term. Everything we may want to do becomes a question for a bureaucrat or an elected official. They control our pay. They control our driving. They control our television, our Internet consumption. They control our healthcare. They control what we smoke, drink, eat – everything.
They pick a new war every few months, if not on another country or group, then on some food that hasn’t been “properly evaluated.” They control. They control. They control – as much as they can.
They control so much, and we let them, all so we can feel “safe,” until such time we become incapable of making our own decisions, like those restauranteurs in Virginia.
Those of us who prefer to make our own decisions have to tolerate those who insist on making them for us.
This isn’t what made America great and it’s what’s going to contribute to our decline as a state and as a nation.