the casual totalitarianism of the technocrat:

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?

let me briefly enumerate some of the ways this is wrong. first of all, it does not follow from the fact that you didn't finish high school that you can barely add. friedman appears to believe that the only way to find out anything is in an institution. and of course it doesn't follow from the fact that you can barely add that you don't drive well.  second, driving is an embodied skill, not measurable by the sats, though the idea that anything of human value might not be standardized testable is of course profoundly alien to an intelligence of friedman's caliber. but that's of course not the point: the point for friedman is how, by hedging people's lives around with police power, we can manufacture the sort of people he thinks ought to exist. third, this is a flat redoubling of class divisions, a way to make poverty or family/neighborhood problems ever more endemic, to just literally stick people where they are like a roach motel. just consider the way a regulation like that would differentially effect black people, or poor people, or latinos, etc. fourth, it just casually assumes that extreme limitations on basic freedoms - such as mobility - can legitimately be imposed unilaterally by state authorities. in other words, it gives you a perfect view of a certain kind of american liberalism, a mind-numbing totalitarian rational standardization of the species. we'd be far better served by...i don't know, a shiite theocracy.

notice that this little brownshirt moment is followed by a series of cliches to which it is entirely irrelevant; it's just there to establish the forward-looking totalitarian bona fides, so that when we go on to say "innovate!" no one can misunderstand what the mechanism of innovation is going to be.

Comments

[mr.fun]

Thmoas Friedmand needs to be hit by a bus.

[crispy]

oops ok robert i fixed the link.

[marriotr]

The link is nonfunctional, so I can't get the context. I want to comment, but the context may, in this case, be important.

[Bracken]

Let's point out, more accident prone drivers are not necessarily more lethal, that bad drivers are not necessarily more accident prone, and showcasing skills behind the wheel does not mean you will not get run over by a drunk hillbilly wearing an eye-patch rocketing through red-lights. Skill or no-skill, your ability to drive and be lethal at it, is a far stretch from any evidence or category of these people or those, more likely or less to commit to the turn, or drive on the wrong-side of the road, or pummel some unsuspecting poodles or citizens.

[Henry]

If someone were caught driving on the sidewalk, say, then we would want to know why he was driving on the sidewalk: was he a young teenager who hadn't learned to control a car, had he had a seizure because he has epilepsy, was he drunk? The reason that he was driving on the sidewalk would affect the way we dealt with the situation: whether we would tell the person that he may not drive again unless he takes driving lessons, takes medication, is sober, for example. If we required him to take driving lessons, then we would want some record on file that he had taken and passed those lessons, so that if he got caught driving on the sidewalk again, we could easily determine the reason. My point is that I do not see how can we avoid licensing.

[Henry]

If we don't license drivers, that wouldn't preclude prohibiting people who do not know how to drive (e.g. young teenagers), or who drive dangerously (e.g., drunk) from driving, would it? If so, then we would have, in effect, negative licensing: you can drive unless you've been prohibited from driving. (I am avoiding defining "we" so that the question can apply to anarchists and non-anarchists.)

[crispy]

on my position, there's no justification for licensing drivers at all. it's not exactly that driving is a right, but that there's no right to restrict it. but i'm not resting this argument on that, just pointing out that a high school degree is completely irrelevant to licensing drivers.

[Henry]

"Joint" in my previous comment should be "join." It was a typo, not a pun referencing "pot."

[Henry]

Yes, of course driving is a right. The state may limit that right for the safety of others, but not for reasons that are unrelated to driving. If it can deny you the right to drive because you dropped out of high school, then it can deny it for any reason (you smoked pot, you didn't joint the military, you didn't go to college). And if it can deny you the right to drive, why can't it deny you the right to walk on public streets that have been paved with taxpayers' money? Or even non-paved public areas, which, after all, are owned by the government?

[Frederick]

So driving is not a privilege... it's a right?