We all know what is meant by the nasty bureaucracy of any state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s a byword, and we can make jokes about it.
My old friend Jim Bennett of George Mason University traveled in the Soviet bloc in the early 1980s on an Agency for International Development junket (because of his position as an adjunct scholar of the Heritage Foundation, which was closely linked to the Reagan administration). I can still recall what he said about the Soviet Union upon his return: “We have nothing to worry about; the place is one big Department of Motor Vehicles.”
We gain an image of the old Soviet Union as surly, inefficient, and extremely frustrating to the most honest and patient of people, the quintessential essence of a government monopoly on any particular thing.
Of course, the website where this joke appears assumes the problem is government. That’s leaping over quite a lot of intellectual territory. The problem is way too many people want private vehicles for use mostly in tightly congested cities with all too many motor vehicles already. And because of the naturally resulting competition between the operators of these vehicles, far too many will not abide by any common sense behavior in regards to others. Those who do have common sense are forced to call for some sort of enforcement over those who would otherwise refuse to abide by any restraints. The Lew Rockwell gang tend to deny such a problem exists, in particular that so many people demand the right to drive their vehicles in such a dense, competitive environment.
Since restrictions only come via government force, it becomes a major element in police functions. Traffic enforcement, including heavy penalties for registration, insurance and licensing violations, is a primary government activity. Naturally, the same venality of human nature appears in the opportunistic politicians who make the whole thing rather profitable for themselves and, incidentally, government treasuries.
In other words, the big mess is entirely dependent on materialism. Too many people want the benefits of a condensed market, so they cluster in cities. Lots more folks are suckered into it for the sake of their own, lesser opportunities to rise above their otherwise boring and peasant existence. The boring peasant existence is actually fairly ideal for humans. It includes a lot of community obligation, but that’s life in this fallen world. No, too many want to be their own god, independent of all others. They want the excitement of constant buzzing hustle in the city, and they have to run around that city in transportation. They can afford to buy their own transportation, so they demand the means to use it, rejecting the concept of shared facilities. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. Out on the rural spaces, it might be easier to justify a privately owned vehicle, but when you embrace the urban atmosphere, you really ought to embrace the whole package, which naturally includes common transportation.
That, too, is never done right. Private providers are too exclusive, refusing service to many who need it, but don’t fit the proper profile for any number of goofy reasons. And government provisions are, well, a DMV on wheels. When American culture changes so that those of the prissy and prosperous middle class don’t act like demigods in hatefully excluding anyone they don’t like, we can trust private provision. Don’t see that? One item: Why do we have the prim and proper necktie as a requirement, a token of bowing to the middle class god of fakery? Nothing about the modern necktie makes any sense at all from the pragmatic standpoint. It requires all manner of empty posturing to defend it, yet you rarely see anyone without it who is taken seriously. For women there is a similar milieu. It is by definition prissy and silly, the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with modern Western Civilization.
The DMV is a natural outgrowth of what we are, and simply getting government out of it won’t fix anything. God’s wrath on us is just.
