Guest Post by Eric Peters
Why is the government even involved in dictating “safety” standards for new cars?
Did the EPA ever get put to a vote?
These are legitimate questions. But rarely asked – and forget about answered.
The Constitution lists – enumerates – the specific powers the government is supposed to have. The Constitution also clearly states that the specific powers not enumerated are “reserved” to the people and the states.
Well, where does it say in the Constitution that the federal government shall have the power to lay down bumper impact standards? Or require that cars be fitted with air bags and back-up cameras?
Just asking…
VW – and all the rest of them – have to bend knee to this “agency” (NHTSA) which no one that I am aware of ever elected. Isn’t the process supposed to be that we elect representatives who then write laws – which we have some degree of veto power over via removing from office representatives whom we decide no longer represent us?
How do we get rid of apparatchiks within an “agency” who never submit to an election – who are effectively tenured for life – but who have assumed the power to write laws? How did they get this power? And – better question – why do we defer to it, accept it as legitimate?
It’s palpably not.
We’re told as kids that we live in a country run by the consent of the governed. Really? Did any of you consent to any of this? Were you even asked?
Or did it just kind of happen – and now you’re required to accept it? Just because?
It is very odd. Or rather, at odds with what we’ve been told.
Remember the line about “no taxation without representation”? Well, uhm … what else is it when the government adds a cost to a new car that you’re forced to pay, but never asked you – never asked anyone – whether they thought it was a good idea, but rather simply decreed that it will be so?
If it walks like a duck…
The “safety” stuff is particularly obnoxious because the “safety” of an adult human being is clearly no business of anyone’s except that adult human being and perhaps his immediate family, who may exert emotional pressure on him to do – or not do – this or that. But there is no issue of the commons. A man not wearing his seat belt may get hurt as a result of this choice, but he hurts no one else as a result of his choice. A man who drives a 1,600 pound pre-air bag/crumple zone Beetle may regret it if he drives it into a tree – but that is his business, is it not? His driving the old Beetle doesn’t hurt anyone else, at any rate. And is therefore his business – assuming we are free adults and not livestock owned by others who have an interest in safeguarding their property.
Think about it.
Government decreeing that you must have air bags in your car is exactly the same as a nosey fishwife neighbor showing up on your doorstep with elbow pads and helmet and insisting that you wear them.
No one elected the neighbor, either.
As a practical consequence of these illegal (because, hey, it is not in the Constitution and therefore proscribed by the Constitution) and ever-escalating fatwas for “safer” and “safer” cars, we have heavier and heavier cars… steel being the primary practical way to achieve this. These government-mandated overweight cars then have a tough time passing muster with another nowhere-authorized-in-the-Constitution federal fatwa insisting that they deliver “x” miles-per-gallon.
Where did that come from?
Well, they will say they have authority via various evasions, euphemisms and legerdemain. But in plain English the fact is that Congress – which has the legal authority under the Constitution to write and pass laws – illegally transferred its legislative authority to these created-by-fiat “agencies” (Nixon simply decreed the EPA into existence) and the unelected apparatchiks within them. A general authority to (effectively) legislate as they please.
This is what EPA and NHTSA do every year – several times a year. They issue regulatory fatwas that have the same force and effect as any law passed by Congress. And yet, they are not legislators, never required to submit to a popular vote of yea or nay regarding what they do in our name but never once with even the slimmest pretext of our consent.
This is the argument car companies ought to present to the people. Not whether air bags and back-up cameras and so on are cost-effective or “work.” That is neither here nor there as regards the fundamental constitutional legitimacy of “agencies” arrogating unto themselves a legislative power nowhere authorized by the Constitution.
We’d almost certainly have fewer in the way of fatwas if Congress were tasked with doing its job – the job specified by the Constitution – the writing and passing of laws. Proposed laws might be debated, for one thing. And – ye gods – they’d be put to a vote.
Imagine that.
The answer is Article 1, section 8, otherwise known as the General Welfare clause, which the Feds have been using for decades to usurp the power of the states, along with the civil rights act, of course.
Congress is given the power to regulate commerce (this is what justifies the gun control laws since they also travel in interstate and international commerce and fall under the regulatory jurisdiction of Congress and is a Tax law as well giving further Constitutional justification),
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: “To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes”
This is the justification for almost all Federal regulatory laws and is almost always upheld by the Supremes no matter what they be.
FWIW, A ruling by the 9th Circuit a number of years back affirmed that this does not apply to commerce strictly within the State when they dismissed a Federal case against a California man for possession of a wholly self made machine gun that was entirely his own design and used no part that was recognizable as a firearm part that had traveled in interstate commerce (he was, of course, still convicted under California State law).
The caveat: The USSC has made other rulings that give the government power to regulate such things as your garden since the food or livestock feed you grow is in competition with those things that are sold and traded in interstate commerce and as such puts you in competition with them and makes you a part of that commerce, Another ruling determined that a business is engaged in interstate commerce it it has a telephone even if it has no out of State customers since it gives free and open access to interstate trade. (of course those things don’t make any sense to a common reasonable man, you have to be a high ranking Judge to think that way).
ZOG will not allow people to dish out ponds in wet areas because that would allow minnows to survive year round to eat mosquito larvae and stop disease; and TPTB want an excuse to spray us with malathion. Same with migratory birds that spread diseases around the planet. Same with big predators that eat livestock. ZOG hate Goy.
I like safer cars. A lot.