An excess of certainties is balanced by a deficit of wisdom

At National Review James Lileks takes off with brilliant wit on a Vox piece by Dylan Matthews. Matthews wants higher taxes on sugar, tobacco, and alcohol, gun control, and a ban on human drivers. Lileks writes,

Never mind the line about guns. Again, tell me something new. It’s the penultimate demand that’s the most revealing. “I want to ban human drivers ASAP.” This does not stand for “A Silly Asinine Proposal.” It’s a sign of the new enlightened man, who has identified — correctly — the interior of the automobile as the last place where one can go about one’s business and do what one wishes. Right now there is a man in a large car who is smoking a cigarette and drinking a Coke, and possibly listening to a talk-radio show that’s ginning up the Benghazi Hoax for the 600th day. We can tax the jeebus out of the items he ingests, but he’ll still have that big car, which (1) will make the oceans rise like the gorge of a New York Times reporter sent to cover NASCAR for the Style section, and (2) allows the driver to live anywhere he wants and go where he pleases.

So we must ban human drivers. We need to do it ASAP. Once we have the technology, and self-driving cars are available, Wham! Down comes another tranche of glorious laws to forbid people from manipulating their own possessions in a manner that suits them. This would require everyone to sell their cars, I guess, except no one would buy them. So the state would buy them from you, perhaps, and give you a voucher to buy a little Google put-put that does 50 mph, unless the U.N.’s daily Carbon Report decides that India belched out a bit too much CO2 yesterday, and everyone has to do 42 mph between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m., after which you can wind ’er up to 45 mph, if you don’t mind your cheeks rippling from G-forces.

Would the ban be for cities only, or for everyone? Would rural North Dakotans have to trade in their pick-ups for dinky bugs, or be required to retrofit their old trusty Chevys for self-driving units? Oh, what a madcap movie someone could make about the gubmint man who has to go to Elk Groin, Mont., and tell the lads down at the garage that they can’t drive their trucks anymore. Let me give you a web address with information about the new laws, fellas, and you can see how it’s just win-win for everybody. Amused at first, the locals decide to humor the fellow, and show him all the quirky joys of small-town life, and he becomes enchanted by a free-spirited woman who raises horses and drives big trucks, and takes him for a wild midnight ride where speeds exceed the legal limit. He goes back to the regional office, a changed man, his heart full of newfound admiration for the ways of these independent people and their curious, outmoded, backwards attachment to “shifting” and “steering” and all those old folkways. He starts to write a report about how the ban shouldn’t be applied to these people, but then shrugs and realizes he has a job review coming up, so he sends the IRS a memo: “You might want to audit all these people.”

Read more here.