• Why there’s no way to enforce a ban on texting while driving.

• How onerous financial rules will only delay economic recovery and dampen long-term growth.

• It’s time to start over on health care reform: “If you’re going the wrong way down a road, the answer isn’t to step on the gas, but to turn around.”

• Is the current recession the worst since the Great Depression? You might be surprised…

• When “history” dials the wrong number.

• Podcast: Will the GOP of 2010 Be led by ideas?

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Radley Balko exposes the politicians who play the game of enacting laws for symbolic purposes.  In this game, whether the proposed law has any actual impact on the supposed problem seems entirely beside the point.  Excerpt:

Maryland just passed a texting ban, but state officials are flummoxed over how to enforce it. The law bans texting while driving but allows for reading texts, for precisely the reasons just mentioned. But how can a police officer positioned at the side of a highway tell if the driver of the car that just flew by was actually pushing buttons on his cellphone and not merely reading the display screen? Unless a motorist is blatantly typing away at eye level, a car would need to be moving slowly enough for an officer to see inside, focus on the phone, and observe the driver manipulating the buttons. Which is to say the car would probably need to be stopped—at which point it ceases to be a safety hazard.

Read the whole thing. Until this feel-good-gesture-legislation game is broken up, the number of laws will continue to multiply.  And that means the sphere of government expands while the sphere of liberty recedes.

Do We Need a Law against Texting While Driving? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In response to claims that texting-while-driving (TWD) causes traffic accidents, Congress is considering “a federal bill that would force states to ban texting while driving if they want to keep receiving federal highway money.”

This approach to forcing a particular policy on the states mimics the 1984 Federal Uniform Driving Age Act, which threatened to withhold federal highway funds unless states adopted a 21-year-old minimum legal drinking age. The justification for that law was reducing traffic fatalities among 18-20 year olds.

A federal ban on TWD is not compelling:

1. Federal imposition of the 21-year old minimum drinking age did not save lives.

2. A ban on texting might increase other distractions: adjusting the radio, putting on makeup, eating a sandwich, reading a map, and so on. Relatedly, the evidence that TWD causes accidents is far from convincing. Traffic fatalities per vehicle mile travelled have declined substantially over the past 15 years, despite the explosion in text messaging.

3. TWD has benefits, not just costs. Truckers, for example, claim that

Crisscrossing the country, hundreds of thousands of long-haul truckers use computers in their cabs to get directions and stay in close contact with dispatchers, saving precious minutes that might otherwise be spent at the side of the road.

4. If the benefits of banning TWD become clear, most states will ban on their own.

Thus laws that penalize TWD might make sense. But this is an issue for states, not the federal government.

C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z.

A Federal Ban on Texting While Driving? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog