Guest Post by Eric Peters
If it’s no longer possible to “speed” – if cars become automated and drivers become passengers – won’t the government lose all the money it currently mulcts from “speeding” drivers?
Of course not.
The revenue will simply be collected via other means. Which means will probably involve much more than merely the collection of revenue.
Distance, for instance, will probably be the replacement tax – applied generally. And emissions per distance. Too much of either – as decided by the government – and we’ll probably be more than merely mulcted.
The car – automated, remember – simply won’t motorvate.
That is, it won’t move once you’ve exceeded your allotted monthly/weekly/annual distance or emissions allowance. Those who control its movement – not you, remember – will decide when it does and doesn’t move as well as how far it moves, in addition to how it moves.
Your automated car’s movements can be programmed in our adjusted as it moves, according to its movements.
And all these movements known in fine detail by those who control the automated car.
It is not generally known – yet – but a large percentage of current cars still nominally controlled by us and so autonomous already have embedded within their electronic systems the means by which they can be controlled automatically.
The necessary tech is being added right under our noses – made part of the standard equipment package and marketed to us as “assistance.” Watch out for that word. It is a danger word – like saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety.
Once a critical mass of cars have this capability it will not only be possible to implement tax-by-distance and taxes on emissions per distance but inevitable.
In the first place, how else to raise the revenue – especially that lost as the result of automated electric cars, which consume no gas and therefore pay no motor fuels tax at all. A federally applied distance tax has already been proposed on exactly this basis and several states, including Oregon, have their own “pilot programs” in the works.
It is inconceivable that the government – whether federal or state – will do without the revenue “lost” to electric cars. Create a problem – then offer a solution. Read up on Hegel; bet your bippie that Urban Planners have.
Once the numbers of EVs increases to more than a sliver of the total pie – at the moment, EVs constitute about 1 percent of all vehicles in service – it is certain a distance tax will be more than just proposed.
Once enacted, the government will have acquired power over distance – implicitly at first.
Exercised inevitably.
Then expanded upon.
If the government acquires power over distance via the power to tax it – why not limit distance? This has already been proposed, too – e.g., “congestion pricing” – and it has been put into practice via variable tolls and so on. It will be much easier to put into practice generally when all – or a certain percentage – of the cars in a given area are automated and so controlled by the government-corporate nexus.
An “update” can be transmitted to the automated car telling it to brick today. Or tomorrow – or for a week.
Or forever.
Perhaps because you posted something “dangerous” or “derogatory” online. Bear in mind that the same entities which are suppressing speech on that basis are also the same entities not just pushing for automated cars but developing them.
Which will give them the power to suppress mobility.
It’s not just distance that will be taxed – and thereby, controlled – in this manner either.
Why control “emissions” via regulations on the manufacture of vehicles when you can control the use of vehicles?
If the distance driven by all the cars on the road were to be halved, think of how much “cleaner” the air would be. And the air can never be too “clean” for the regulatory/technocratic apparat’s tastes – even when it isn’t “dirty” to begin with.
It would certainly be much “cleaner” than it will or ever could be be via the fractional per-car shavings of emissions achieved via engineering.
Someone – AOC, for instance – will surely notice this (or be told to notice this) and propose that “meaningful” reductions be achieved by flipping the proverbial Off switch. Which switch will be under the control of people such as AOC, not you – even if you’re the one making the payments on the automated car.
If one accepts the premises – that carbon dioxide is an “emission” and that its release by human activity such as driving is “changing” the climate in a cataclysmic manner that must be arrested before it is Too Late – it is very hard to come up with a compelling counterargument to the idea of limiting distance for the sake of saving the Earth.
Which is why this will likely be the argument used to justify the limiting of distance – as well as the taxation of it. Both serving the same end goal of limiting and ultimately completely controlling our mobility.
By now, the endgame ought to be obvious even to the usually oblivious. Even a drunken hobo asleep on the train tracks usually wakes up when he feels the tracks vibrating, the herald of the impending train.
Will enough of us wake up in time?
When this regime of limiting distance is imposed upon us, it will make us look back with fond nostalgia upon the era of the radar trap and the speed cop. When it was still possible to “speed” – even if you sometimes didn’t “get away” with it and when the only thing which limited your mobility was how much gas you had in the tank and how far you wanted to go.
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Fortunately, cars will never become autonomous beyond the most minimal level…But they will be rigged to spy on you all the time…
Eric-
I continue to enjoy your articles and after reading, I usually come to conclude agreement with the long standing maxim: it takes a while to see the obscure, and just a little while longer to see the obvious. I think a major component is missing from this article – and perhaps several other from the past – is there will always be the other Pandora’s box: hacking, in this case. I would expect that there would be the jail-break hacks that would end up with a lot of intended & unintended consequences for the .gov and individuals alike and more vehicles (as proposed) have greater ‘intelligence’ built-in. Just a (if I may be so bold) solution in a ‘free’ market. Spy vs Spy, one spiraling challenge that begets further response and costs.
Music to my eyes!!! How many times i’ve brought up the subject with friends about the missing “gas (road) tax” lost on electric vehicles – what it’s going to be replaced by – only to hear the sound of silence.
Distance tax on EVs first…..then the rest of us. My guess is that eventually older non-electronically surveilled cars will be banned from the roadways. Thus effectively “closing the loop”.
Push hard enough, and the smoke from the crematories will make up for all the air pollution that electric vehicles “eliminated.”