Did you know the average cost of car insurance for a 16-year-old is almost $3,000 annually? This assumes assuming no tickets, no accidents and a good scholastic record. Yes, they actually check the kid’s grades and use that as a metric for determining his “risk profile,” just as adult drivers are dunned by the insurance mafia if their credit score isn’t top-shelf, regardless of their driving record.
So, a $250 per month cost-of-entry before the car even leaves the driveway. Before the kid puts gas in the thing.
Before the kid even has a car to put gas into.
How is he supposed to get a car – or afford gas – when he is obliged to pony up $250 each month to the insurance mafia?
Most adults with full-time jobs would have serious troubling dealing with a $250/month nut for insurance.
How is a teenage kid working a minimum wage/part-time gig supposed to deal with it?
Faced with this extortion – and that’s exactly the right word; there’s no choice about paying the $250 per month, if the kid wants to drive legally – many simply opt out. A record-high percentage of 16-25-year-olds haven’t even got a driver’s license and forget the car. They stay home instead, game and text. When they need to get somewhere, they ride share or Uber or something that doesn’t require them to spend a minimum of 20-25 hours working at minimum wage (currently $7.25 per hour) gig hauling pizzas or some such just to tithe the mafia.
More and more of them just don’t care about cars – or driving.
Mission accomplished.
One way to get people out of cars – an agenda that has existed since at least the early ’70s in furtive “urban planning” circles but which has become aggressively obvious in recent years – is to make sure they never get into them. And the easiest way to do that is to make driving prohibitively and unavoidably expensive for new drivers especially. If they never learn to drive, they’ll never miss not driving. (See my article on the Proletarianization of Transportation for more on this.)
A kid doesn’t have to buy a new car or even a $3,000 used car. He can buy any car that rolls under its own power or even not – to be fixed up and made capable of rolling as the kid’s means permit.
This latter being part of the bonding experience with cars generations of teen drivers experienced growing up.
One of my high school buddies owned a palsied chocolate brown ’77 Datsun B210 with no reverse. Well, it had a reverse. Said so, right there on the shifter. It just didn’t work. When it was time to back out of the 7-11 parking lot, we’d simultaneously open the doors and push the car back with our feet, Fred Flintstone-style.
That car – in which we had numerous adventures – cost my friend less than $300 and the insurance was nowhere near $3,000.
Which is why my friend – all my friends – had a car, however decrepit. And were able to drive them. On our own part-time/minimum-wage nickel.
This was the 1980s. Everyone drove as soon as they legally could and some before then. We champed at the bit to get our driver’s licenses; it was a major life event, a clear sign of almost-adulthood. We became independent, no longer tethered to home and mom and dad.
No one who wasn’t in a wheelchair didn’t have a driver’s license. The big nut for us was getting the car to go with it. Which we managed because the car was the main expense and we had the freedom to buy what we could afford.
But $3,000 for coverage renders the car a moot point.
It requires almost full-time work to afford that and the car plus the gas and not many 16-year-olds are working full time because they can’t. The law requires them to be in school full time, whether they’d prefer to be working being as irrelevant as my desire to keep what I earn rather than have half of it stolen from me by the multi-tiered thievery that styles itself “taxation.”
Usurious insurance cuts the connection between young man (and young woman) and machine before one is ever established. You cannot love what you never knew.
And tithing the mafia is all-but-unavoidable today. There is no way out for the current crop of teen would-be-drivers.
It’s not like it was back in the pre-police state days, when you could – as it is styled – “get away” with driving without tithing, if the cost was too usurious. There weren’t automated license plate readers back in the ’80s – or even the early 2000s – and the mafia didn’t have instant access to your DMV records and wasn’t IV connected to the DMV, able to narc you out to the DMV the instant they noticed your “coverage” had lapsed or simply been cancelled
This was also the pre-checkpoint era, too. No “papers, please” pit stops.
Provided you didn’t cause a problem there was no problem.
Imagine that.
Today, the chances of being sussed out as a mafia scofflaw are much higher – and the consequences as or even more severe than they would be if you actually did cause a problem.
You might as well drive drunk on the sidewalk; the end result is more or less the same – in terms of what the government will do to you if you’re caught driving without tithing. And for the parents, too. A teen being a legal minor, it is his parents who will be dragooned in for the rubber hose treatment if their young son or daughter is caught driving sans tithing.
Effectively, the parents are thus dragooned into being the mafia’s agents – ensuring compliance. And since the kids can’t afford the $3k nut – and most parents can’t, either – the kid doesn’t merely give up driving, he never bothers with it at all.
This is the beauty of the thing – from the standpoint of both the insurance mafia (which can enforce policy premiums that are worse than gangster loan shark interest rates because the gangster doesn’t force you to take out the loan, doesn’t punish you for not borrowing money) and the get-them-out-of-cars-early “urban planner” crowd.
Money – and power. Not necessarily in that order, but the same things, at the end of the day.
The adults go slowly broke trying to keep alive their love of cars and of driving – while their kids never even get to first base, so to speak. They learn to love dependence – or at least, they get used to it.
Because it’s all they’ve ever known.
. . .
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It’s a shame the police have to be utilized to help enforce the rules of the Insurance Mafia. It would be nice if they found more useful things to do with their time.
Unfortunately, there are too many of them with too much time on their hands, so they decide to set up those checkpoints and speed traps, things which should be illegal. But if it serves the needs of the Mafia, it will always be acceptable to them.
Hi Travis,
I’ve been ranting for years that – along with the income tax – when the first random checkpoints were declared to not be an affront to the Fourth and Fifth Amendments (as well as common decency) – it was clear that America was no longer even plausibly a free country. Can anything be more emblematic of not-free than no longer being free to travel unmolested by agents of the government in the absence of any specific reason to suspect the individual has committed even the slightest infraction of law?
Good morning eric, I agree with you but I’m not sure what time period you speak of. Living in Tx. we were always subjected to systemic checks at the borders with Mexico even though the check point might be 50 miles into Tx.
The immoral and uncivil laws the Clintons passed in the name of fighting crime were the first laws I thought were completely over the top. Since the Clintons purporting to fight crime was the ultimate irony, it was certainly the writing on the wall of killing the Constitution. I had a lawyer friend who best summed it up by saying the Clintons were more Republican-like than many Republicans.
I was surrounded by Bush suckers and anything I said about their demonic policies was met with spittle-spewing rants of “Americanism” and how I was a commie Democrat. I would point out the Democrats, of which I claimed no bias for, at least hadn’t showed up to the new century with the goal obviously in mind of destroying the Constitution even though the Clintons made a good run for it.
When the Patriot Act reared it’s ugly head I knew, deep in my gut as the shrub would say, it was going to be some bad juju. Once it was passed and various parts of it exposed to the filthy light of the day, I realized I had underestimated it and could hear the Nazi’s marching in the street even from west Tx.
There were senators, almost every one a Democrat who voted for it and then opposed it. No guts, nothing but a suit whose main need in life was being elected and re-elected. A few, very few didn’t vote for it and they were soon purged.
I’ll be honest and admit I had not followed Strom Thurman’s voting record much and had been admittedly biased by the press to him. But he stood up and said the vote needed to be put off until the bill could be read and as you know, the mantra of the day was to say ‘You must vote for it before you can read it”. I’m certainly no genius nor did it take one to figure out the American people were about to get “law” broken off in their collective ass….and they did.
When the original NDAA bill was put forth, and you Could read it before voting for it, when it got huge support of both sides of the aisle, poor old Strom stood and confronted the entire CONgress and railed against them, not only shaking but shaking his fists and said they were all traitors. He was right as rain and now we’ve revisited NDAA every 4 years or so and reaffirm it needs to be even worse each time.
Once Obama was installed and he simply took up Shrubco’s playbook, it was obvious we weren’t about to get any better in lieu of rights but just the opposite. And so it went and so it goes. Trump is radical “law and order”, aggressive military and radically for laws to help the super-rich.
When he was running for office, he wanted to show his support for working people and all in the news at the time was how the truckers were going to be screwed by the DLB, the Digital Log Book. So he gets a “representative” trucker up there to smile and eat his shit and of course it was somebody who know truckers identify with and pretty much hate, a Teamster. He couldn’t have picked a worse example of “free trade”…..but he wouldn’t know free trade if it ran over him.
Teamsters and the entire festering cesspool of corruption in the NE is the reason almost every large 48 state trucking company has opt outs of NYC at the least and for the most part, New England in its entirety.
When I was a young man I found out quickly I was about to get fucked some way or another when I showed up at a port and the guys working there had NYC accents…..and even looked and dressed differently. They took the corruption of New York with them no matter if it was Galveston or Houston.
I could go on but everybody is bored already with this rant since most of it is simply a rehash of what we’ve all witnessed in the last 25 years. As Jeremy would say “Cheers” although he has a better attitude, at least online, than me.
Guten Morgen Herr Peters!
What absolutely kills me- and what should be an obvious sign to anyone with an IQ above 60 that this government is a dictatorship and completely exempts itself from the rule of law and the Constitution which is supposed to govern it, is how the Supreme Court justified the existence of those checkpoints: Declaring that if they stopped only every 4th car, or every 7th car (etc.( that it wasn’t “a random” stop.
Using semantics to destroy the clear intent of the foundational law which is supposed to uphold our most basic rights!
THAT is the caliber of the venerated men who wield the ultimate power over one of largest and most powerful nations on earth! -Who are supposedly men of “honor”(LOL) and education; and whose word is literally law- and we are expected to believe that they are so dumb and naive as to actually believe the BS which they peddle?
THAT was indeed America’s last gasp of any pretense of liberty- after that, everything else- like the Patriot Act and Obozocare- was a mere given.
And as if THAT isn’t bad enough, now they don’t even hold to the “every nth car technicality! In low traffic areas, they just stop everyone; in higher traffic areas, they profile.
And it’s even more sickening to see that most ‘mercans support and cheer for this crap!!! Go on a local forum and complain about these checkpoints (which are becoming more and more common/often) and virtually everyone will oppose you, and defend the destruction of their liberty.
This is why there is no hope for this country, and why it will only get worse- much worse- and more and more dangerous.
Nunzio, once again, you’re spot on. There’s no use whining about it. No use telling people to wake up because we’ve all drank too much of the Kool Aid to do much about it anymore. Either hunker down in some out of the way spot inside the prison or make your escape.
The more I look at this, the more I can see that this has been going on since the beginning this evil empire began. I don’t know why exactly, but it boils down to being so distracted with bread and circuses that I just didn’t seem to care. Now, everywhere I look it’s just more of the same BS. It’s the little things that bother me though. I’ve got a fair amount of native California Indian, enough to qualify for all those government goodies, but the tribe is now down to such low numbers that they’re no longer considered a federally recognized tribe anymore. So I still have to pay for a fishing license like all the other losers in this screwed up country. That’s not what bothers me, but the fact that the government is all about screwing anyone and everyone out of the idiotic deals our ancestors agreed to.
I stopped driving a truck before these paperless logs went into effect. I still don’t know when they made that crap mandatory, but just the fact that it happened and I had to hear about it at all makes me want to leave this shit hole of a country. Just wait until we’re all driving around with some computer monitoring our every move. Wait until they decide that it’s not safe for anyone to drive more than ten hours a day.
People in the US look down at third world countries, and don’t seem comprehend what defines a third world country. Third world countries export raw materials and import everything else. We even export our garbage, but that’s changing rapidly. When I look around it looks like this country is full of garbage. I can’t wait to see the Carolinas get rebuilt only to have another storm sweep in and gut that place all over again. I was just down around Fort Myers yesterday and noticed all the rebuilding going on right on the coast line.
Hurricane Irma blew right in between me and Orlando as a category 1, which isn’t all that shocking, but if she had blown the roof off my house, I wouldn’t be living here today. I’m in about the safest spot to weather a hurricane, and the chances of another one are pretty slim, but if one does cruise through here, there’s no way I’m wasting another dollar on this dump, and I live in a nice area too. A nice home in a screwed up demon possessed country. Somehow having a nice place in the heart of the beast doesn’t appeal to me much anymore.
Well-said Shnark!
And it’s so true. We can look back to earlier periods in our lives when the tyranny wasn’t so bad, and “Yeah, we were pretty free then”- but really, it’s just a matter of degrees.
Yeah, I fondly remember the 70’s- and they sure were freer than today- but really, people were being thrown in jail and having their property confiscated by the IRS then, too, for not paying their extortion; and 1000 other things.
The tyranny just wasn’t so “in our face”; Didn’t reach as far into as many aspects of our personal lives; didn’t affect as many people as severely- but it sure was there.
And ditto the times before were born- whether it was prohibition in the ’20’s being not unlike “the war on [some] drugs”; or the government fostering the taking of farmer’s and rancher’s property by the railroads; or killing the Injuns; or compulsory education and draconian building codes in places like Boston, even well over 100 years ago…..
Yeah, it may’ve been easier to stay under the radar; to find a little more freedom then- but this has definitely been a cursed evil empire from early-on- and once we know the facts and have a realistic understanding of history, we can’t deny it unless we don’t care that any good aspects of it came at the expense of the lives and liberties of many, many innocents.
Even if we kid ourselves and think that we can avoid the fate which now in the process of being delivered upon this people, what kind of person would we be if we could see such evil and tyranny going on right around us, and turn a blind eye to it and say “As long as it doesn’t touch me, I’ll be O-K”?
But of course, it will touch us. It has touched us, and is touching us. There is just no escaping within, from this hyper-tyranny coupled with high-technology.
Hey, speaking of the tribal stuff: Get a load of this: My then 92 year-old aunt in CA. married a guy from Peru who was 20 years younger. After getting her to buy a nice house and such over the next few years, he managed to speed her departure at the age of 96 (Nothing was wrong with her!)- inherited all of her money (The house; another rental house in S. CA. and probably a hundred or two grand)…blew it all gambling within a few months, and now lives in a house they gave him because of his native blood….. I guess in CA. “Native American” includes Native South American too…..
I’d been to the place where these free homes are (30 years ago) on the outskirts of the Sierra-Nevada town where he lives. It’s one step above a slum. Serves the bastard right! (I bought a dirtbike from somebody who lived there, when I was there for a short spell- I still remember the guy I bought it from- nice guy- Pablo- part Mexican and part I-forget-what Indian- Paiute I think- there were a lot of them in the area. It’s funny the stuff we remember- I remember going to the guy’s house. )
Awww, geez, I’m starting to sound like Eightman! 😉
To be honest, I was one of those people who didn’t really give it much thought until it was in my back yard. When I think of what’s going on inside the US and what the government is doing to its own citizens, it pales in comparison to the wholesale destruction to those living in other countries. Every time I hear someone start talking about how some country on the other side of the planet needs democracy, or is the bad guy that needs to be stopped, I want to puke. The rest of the world is getting tired of the US telling them how to live their lives. They’re not so interested in buying our debt anymore either. They’re all doing these sly deals on the side and leaving the US out of the deal. Maybe Trump has a card up his sleeve, but he’ll still need a miracle to pull us out of this mess. I’d like to see it happen, but I seriously doubt it.
It seems like there just isn’t a day that goes by where I’m not being reminded of why I need to get out of here.
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and out of the blue he says that he just wished someone would club him to death or put a bullet in his head to put him out of his misery. Every other person in his neighborhood has stage 4 cancer. It’s positively absurd. That fact alone gets me to looking around my neighborhood, and noticing that my nearest neighbor has pertussis, my neighbor down the street has prostate cancer. The neighbor two doors down from him has something that his doctors can’t diagnose, but they ‘ve been giving him all sorts of drugs which only seem to make things worse. His wife just had a second course of chemo/radiation. The neighbors next to them have lukemia, and the list just seems to get longer the more I look at it.
You have a higher chance of heart disease, cancer and diabetes simply by living in the continental US. After heart disease and cancer, the third leading cause of death in the US is medical treatment including taking prescriptions as prescribed by your doctor.
The leading cause of death for fire fighters and paramedics is heart disease, and the most common calls they receive are for people suffering from heart disease. It’s idiotic!
Hand a kid a broccoli crown, or some spinach, or a few tomatoes and tell them to try them and I bet you most would look at it as some sort of a dare, and start gagging just thinking about it. If it isn’t soaked in high fructose corn syrup and swimming in butter and melted cheese, their digestive system can’t handle it. Go to the local fair sometime and look at all the people wandering around eating what can only be most accurately described as solidified gelatinous grease on a stick. bleh.
I think too, Shnark, the level of local tyranny where one lives has an effect on how soon they realize these things- IF they have any penchant for liberty and justice.
I lived the first 39 years of my life in the NYC metro area- Long Island and Queens- and the tyranny there really started ramping up in the 80’s- along with the taxes (I never owned property there- couldn’t afford to pay the absurd taxes [nor would I if I could], let alone being able to afford the crazy prices all the fools pay to live in some dump in a crime-infested cement jungle).
Growing up 60 miles east of NYC was idyllic at the time (Late 60’s and 70’s) I probably wouldn’t have given such things much thought- but being forced to go to school, and being prevented from working (as a child) left no doubt in my mind that we indeed were not free- and that all the BS about freedom that the teachers and other adults were peddling, were just lies- not to mention seeing people drafted in to the military to fight in the Vietnam war- a war which no adults could seem to explain, and to which just asking questions about it, or about the absurdity of a draft in a “free country”, would elicit angry responses, tantamount to pissing in the “holy water” of a Catholic church.
It just snowballed from there. I wanted this freedom of which people spoke, but which did not exist. In my 20’s, I pretty much formulated Libertarian philosophy- not knowing until quite recently, that others had already done the same thing before me- only they stated it much more concretely and eloquently than I.
Yes, the health stuff! People are amazed when they find out that I haven’t been to a doctor in 40 years- except for the eye doctor. My mother bugs me incessantly to “go for a check-up”.
I keep telling her that that is the worst thing one could ever do- and what would be the point anyway? I’m not going to take their drugs (I’ve always hated drugs of any variety!) and I’m not going to have surgery (Nor could i afford it)- I live a happy life, and eat very cleanly- let the chips fall where they may.
My friend near Ft. Myers was recently diagnosed with prostate and bone cancer (Skeleton-type bones..not the other kind… 🙂 )- 70 years old, but strong as an ox- still rides motorcycles, and you wouldn’t want to fight him; still does hard physical work. Had no complaints- but went for the infamous check-up and they told him he had cancer. Bear in mind that many people have cancer cells in their bodies, and their bodies fight them just fine; but when the docs do cancer testing, if they determine that your body is fighting a cancer, they decalre that you have cancer…and the “treatment” they offer, chemo and radiation- ends up destroying your immune systems natural ability to fight that cancer, as well as destroying many other critical parts of the body, so you wither away, and then when you die from those treatments, they even admit their folly, listing “complications from [the treatment of] cancer” as the cause.
I’ve seen it happen to so many people I have known. I stay away from doctors. That way, they can never scare me into thinking i have cancer, and accepting their treatments- and if I really did have cancer, I’d rather just take my chances with it or die naturally, than live in misery while letting their “medicine” make my remaining time unbearable- like a guy I know back in NY in his early 60’s whom they destroyed- and who now has to have some place him on the toilet in order to go to the bathroom. I would take my chances- If I did have cancer, I’d probably last longer without their “treatment” and if not, at least what time I would have would be of higher quality.
And between stress, and what people eat- my goodness! I shop for my 93 year-old mother (She won’t eat the stuff I raise- she is so used to the watered-down store stuff- though she still eats pretty good)- and I am flabbergasted at what I see in the supermarket!
90% of the stire is given over to sugar-laden, fat-laden, highly processed chemicalized garbage.
One whole aisle each for:
Potato chips
Ice cream
Cookies
Mushy garbage white bread or fake “Whole wheat”.
The store is ringed by fatty, processed meats (Is that where Ed gets his expression “ringmeat” from?)
Another whole aisle for soda.
Candy.
Sugar-laden Cereals.
Frozen junk, which has more chemicals and artificial fats than actual food.
The amount of actual real food in the big supermarket, could fit inside of a tiny bodega.
And it gets worse every year. The staple items are disappearing, because few people cook from scratch anymore.
Even things like pasta and rice and beans- the shelf space alotted to them gas dwindled- and it is all being replaced with microwaveable garbage convenience foods.
But “Americans are eating healthier” ya know! (And it’s a free country!)
Nun, I went to the store Sat., mainly to go to the pharmacy. If you want to see the “eat shit and love it” crowd, Sat. is the day for it. I bought a some fruit, organic when it was available, avocado, Jalos(the huge fuckers dammit, nobody even sells heirloom jalos), spuds(Idaho), lettuce(Ca.), purple onions, and organic spinach….which was $2.28 pckg(frozen)vs. $2.00 for regular…I can do that but apples that cost 4 times as much I don’t buy, just remove the skin. Then I held my nose and bought some commercial bacon, commercial eggs and yogurt with peaches and strawberry added which I mainly Don’t eat, for the wife who will eat most anything.
I bought beer, knowing every drop of liquid involving water is polluted with plastic, even RO which is what we drink.
It sounds bad I know but you should have seen what everyone else was buying. Oreo’s seemed to be cheap so they were selling well. Then those aisles with nothing but chemicals, the chip aisle. Oh, and some flour tortillas since they don’t really require much of anything besides flour and I suppose I could make them but I have no organically grown wheat to make flour so WTH.
The entire trip made me think of blasting bambi and porky when I got home since we’re over-run with deer but not with hogs…..more later about wild hogs.
Eight, I remember briefly when they used to sell real yogurt. Now, it’s almost all turned into candy- gelatin(fat) and sugar.
Seems to be the common modus operandi- take something that’s healthy and natural, and turn it into candy- and then hawk it as “healthy” because it keeps the same name.
I have to start growing my own jalo’s- these huge ones are worthless- no matter how many of the big ones I put in my chili, you can’t even taste ’em. Little ones? 3 or 4 would do ya.
It’s like the food they’re selling is objects shaped like real foods; and the same color….but it might as well be plastic or painted Play-dough.
Meanwhile, in many third-world countries, the norm is to buy food directly from the guy who grew it.
PS. Shnark, Glad your roof didn’t go away! My friend lives down in Ft. Myers *The one who had the 52′ Gulfstar)- but his house is made of cement, so I’m sure he’s good.
But yeah- the irony- I can understand Eric’s [and others] reluctance to flee, ’cause I have a wonderful place here too. I knew 17 years ago when I bought it and hacked it out of woods and an old cow pasture, that it was just a temporary stop, because I was ready to leave the country even then, but couldn’t yet- but this is the place I’ve always wanted; the way I’ve always wanted to live; It’s beautiful, and costs practically NOTHING to live here. It seems insane that I would give it up- but yet, I know if I don’t, I’ll just have to keep moving that line in the sand further and further back- and she’s already further back than I’d care for it to be- and more and more, we must either comply or die/lose everything; every time we go out on the road (which I keep to a minimum) we risk involvement with the badged ones, and literally face the prospect of death or of getting dragged into their system……so we either do the smart thing, and recreate a good life somewhere freer and safer, or give up what little remains of our liberty and self-respect; autonomy; and man-hood, and become “one of them”.
Nunzio, coincidently I was also looking at a Gulfstar while I was down in Ft. Myers. A quite nice, but also overpriced one. I looked at it anyways because I already know that they’ll probably come down a good 10 to 20 k. The yacht salesman even pointed out that the owner would readily snatch up an offer a good 15k below her asking price. I can’t even low ball these people before they drop the price down below my low ball offer.
I also like my place. It’s secluded, quiet, and yet fairly close to some nice trails, lakes, rivers, etc. I’m only about half an hour away from the gulf of Mexico which seems to allow some gulf breezes in the summer months to still reach me. I didn’t have to do a whole lot of work to the place to get it livable. I worked on it for about two weeks, and moved in. I really hate to leave it, but I also know that I will quickly forget how nice it is once I’m down in the Caribbean because it really isn’t all that nice compared to the Caribbean. it’s just a great place to live compared to most places in the rest of the prison. it actually kind of reminds me of those prisons down in Mexico where they’re really just like small towns inside a walled prison. Some places are better, but we’re still in a prison.
Shnark, my friend sold his Gulfstar for $25K (Directly- no salesmen)- He had picked it up on Ebay for $18K through that “Boatangel” charity. Did very little work to it. The woodwork needed refinishing to be in the “yacht” class; had no electronics; and had had a few inches of water over the sole- but nothing that someone like you or I couldn’t live perfectly fine with. All my friend did was get the engine running. He bought it intending to keep it, but the mast was too tall to dock it at the cheaper places by him, which required going under a bridge that was about 4′ too low.
https://imgur.com/a/f146peq
I was sorry when he sold it- I figured that it might figure into my escape.
And you’re absolutely right! Our places may seem nice compared to a lot of the shitholes people live in in this country- but it’s not like there aren’t nice- and even much nicer places, for less money, and with more freedom, elsewhere.
I’ve lived in a few places over the years- and I’m glad I did. Different experiences- new frontiers. Keeps you from getting bored, and makes you a richer person.
One never knows what they’re missing, until they look!
You’re preaching to the choir again Nunzio, I was just a kid when my father started reading Mises, Hazlitt, Hayak, Reed, Rothbard, etc. There was some talk about Austrian economics among the adults, just enough to spark my interest when I was around my mid 20’s. Even then it was more of a curiosity than anything else, but after a while of living in a glorified prison, that stuff begins to find its way back into one’s consciousness.
I also spent a little time in jail, and when getting out looks more like just being transferred, it begins to wear on your mind.
I ate a slice of watermelon yesterday, and before I was done eating it, my feet were killing me. It’s happened before, but I didn’t make the connection. It’s not well known by the masses, but most fruit in the supermarkets today has been hybridized (not to be confused with genetically modified) to increase the sugar content(in some cases over 70 to 80%). If I go to grab some apples, I have to get the cheap crab apples because they’ve got almost no sugar in them. The rest of the stuff has so much sugar in it, it gives me a hangover. Two slices of watermelon after dinner will keep me up after midnight, and then tossing and turning all night with restless leg syndrome.
Doctors today are basically owned by Big Pharma. All they can do is cut you up or dope you up. I was having trouble with my feet. I went to the podiatrist who informed me that the insoles I had been prescribed by another podiatrist were smashed out of shape and destroying my feet. He then referred me to a specialist; a neurologist who did some tests and discovered that my nerves were shot. My wiring harness basically needs to be replaced. The solution? Dope. He informed me that once I started taking the pain medication he was prescribing, I would have to remain on it for the rest of my life. I tore up the prescription and left.
My fiancé and I used to joke about how we were always coming down with “a touch of the cancer”. I was getting it all the time, and then she had to have a mastectomy followed by chemo/radiation. After completing that nightmare, her oncologist gave her the thumbs up and said to go live life. Two months later she was dead.
She told me that if they ever told her she had cancer again, she was going to pass on the chemo/radiation. She was never the same afterward.
My sister went to a dermatologist to get some cluster of moles removed from her tricep. The doc told her that it didn’t look that bad and to come back again in six months. My sister can get a look on her face that can make an atheist pray for divine help. She politely informed the dermatologist that she didn’t come for a visit and an opinion, but to have these things removed because she didn’t have a license to do it herself. She also told him that she wanted them biopsied. Out of a sense of self preservation, he complied and lo and behold, she had cancer spreading through her body. She had to have half of the lymph nodes removed from under her arm as well as a crater from her tricep. If she’d waited six months she would have been dead.
She was then referred to an oncologist for chemo/radiation. She went and conferred with the oncologist not knowing that they have only one recommendation. She asked him what would he do if it was him or his daughter, and surprisingly, he admitted that he wouldn’t do chemo or radiation. She split and hasn’t had a problem with it since.
Susan Sommers had a book out years ago describing her bout’ with cancer which turned out to be a false alarm. She discovered what you already know which is that cancer can grow and recede all the time. For some reason she couldn’t go through with the chemo/radiation treatment. She had some prior commitment to attend to before she could do it. When it was time to do the chemo, she was tested again, and it was gone.
There’s some young guy in his early 20’s who came down with a bad case of stage 4 prostate or colon cancer, and decided to tell his oncologist to pound sand. He went out and tried everything he could find to deal with it, and six months later, he was cancer free. He’s got some videos on youtube, one which points out that all of these cancer research outfits like Susan B. Komen etc. are all donating their money to Big Pharma to come up with new patented chemo treatments.
Some of these cancer treatment centers down south of the border in Mexico and elsewhere are veritable resorts. They charge quite a bit, but they pamper you pretty well. They also flush out your system of all the processed crap your body is holding onto that’s making people so sick. After they get the system cleaned up, then they start teaching people how to eat healthy again. Some churches in the southwest take whole busloads of people down there to get well again.
Everywhere the American diet is exported to, people end up getting sick. There’s a documentary called something like “Sweet Suicide”, and they show these natives from Papua New Guinea that have been living untouched from outside civilization for millennia. The elders who are well into their 80’s and 90’s look like they’re in their 40’s and 50’s and ripped. They’re out hunting, and fishing, and dancing and love life. They don’t get cancer, or heart disease. They don’t have cavities or eye problems. They’ve never been to a doctor, and they all die of old age; at least that was the way it was until someone dropped a Coca Cola vending machine into the jungle.
The problem isn’t animal fat, at least not if one stays away from sugar. Sugar cracks arteries, and cholesterol is the body’s way of patching the cracks. If there’s not perforations in the arteries, then the cholesterol just floats on through without ever clogging up anything.
The really sad thing about this country is that we’re literally conditioned to age, get sick and die. There have been a couple of studies; one with men and a later one with women where they took people in their 80’s and 90’s to some resort for a week or two. Everything at the resort was 50 years old. The magazines, the newspapers, the radio and television programs were all television programs from 50 years ago. Everything at this resort told them that they had walked back 50 years into the past. A week or two later, people who had walked in on walkers were up walking around on their own. Everyone looked at least 15 to 20 years younger. It wasn’t that they thought they were younger, but that the environment around them was telling their senses that they were 50 years younger, and their bodies began to comply with what their senses were being told. The before and after pictures were a bit disturbing in how some had clearly regained not just a youthful appearance, but they were feeling younger and who knows if they weren’t actually younger?
We learn this stuff when we’re young. At some point a child sees someone who is 50 or 60 and they get an imprint in their mind that this is what a 50 or 60 year old person looks like. Some people see youthful people at that age so they age better than those who get the idea that 50 years old is death warmed over.
In the US, you need to get your prostate/colon checked when you get to be 50. A few of my buddies sounded the alarm when I told them I was over 50. I then asked them if they investigated how the scope that was used to give them their colonoscopy exam was disinfected. None of them had bothered to inquire. I then informed them that over 80% of scopes in the US are cleaned with a process that can leave fecal matter evident with the naked eye. Only 20% use a scope that can handle the temperatures necessary to actually disinfect and sterilize a scope. Those scopes are naturally quite a bit more expensive, but when it comes to your alimentary canal; isn’t it worth it to pay the extra money?
I also informed them that I’ve gone out of my way to take better care of myself. I don’t eat processed crap or a lot of meat so I’m not a candidate for prostate or colon cancer. They say getting a biopsy for prostate cancer is one of the best ways imaginable to spread cancer; same for a mastectomy. Cutting into cancer or a tumor just provides it with a vector of transmission to the rest of the body.
I developed a heart palpitation when I was in my late teens. I spent the next 25 years getting defibrillated and taking lots of expensive drugs to keep my heart beating in a normal rhythm.
The side effects were horrid, and then one day I discovered that a couple of these meds were robbing my body of magnesium, which is vital to having a healthy heart beat. The meds were killing me. They were destroying my kidneys and liver as well. Then I found out about this Chinese herbal remedy. I gave it a shot, and voila; my atrial fibrillation is gone. I had to order it direct from China, and when it arrived, I thought I didn’t order enough so I emailed customer service to find out about ordering some more. They informed me that I had the right order, and that my heart would probably stop fibrillating within a week, but to continue taking it until it was all gone, and that I would never need to take it ever again.
If I had taken this stuff 30 years ago I could literally have saved myself a million dollars in medical procedures, health insurance and medications. Fuck Western medicine, health care, and Big Pharma!
Eric, have you seen the videos on YouTube of the Baptist preacher down in Arizona who started trolling the border patrol agents? They eventually decided to hit back. It’s all on video, but it looks like it all backfired. Now he rolls through their checkpoints and snots off because he sued them. They’ve all got his number, but can’t touch him. As soon as he rolls into a check point, they just wave him on. Now that guy is doing something about making sure he still lives in a free country. He lives in a free country. You, not so much. I’d provide a link, but your cite won’t let me post it then. The videos are pretty entertaining. This preacher is quite brazen in his demeanor to the border guards. It seems asinine when he gets his windows bashed in and he’s bodily removed from his car all bloody, but after all the dust settles and he’s got a court judgement in his favor, it doesn’t look so bad for him now.
Shnark, are you thinking of Steven Anderson? If so, it’s not quite that rosy. After the guy was dragged out of his vehicle and beaten and tased, he was charged with a bunch of “crimes”. He had two attorneys, and it cost a lot of money, and luckily, the jury found him innocent. No repercussions for the real criminals involved (Border PAtrol and local police, etc.).
He then filed a civil suit for a million dollars, and either he lost, or just ended up getting enough to pay his legal expenses from his criminal trial, etc.
Cost him several years of his life; much money, and aggrevation (One of us would never have been able to afford to have the good lawyers- He luckily, has a lot of people, locally and on the internet, who support him), and I do believe that he now avoids such confrontations, because they would likely only end in a repeat of what he already suffered. Him having been found merely innocent, and possibly getting a couple of hundred grand in the civil suit, is no deterrent to the badged goons who are above the law, and when the money doesn’t come out of their pockets, but rather from yours.
Next time, they’ll probably do him worse and will be laying for him, so as to make the charges stick; maybe even plant something on him.
There’s no winning in a police state.
There is a LOT of misinformation out there about this incident- i.e. some claiming that he won a million dollars in the civil suit, etc.
Part of the lingering disaster of what was known as the Rehnquist Court, after Supreme Magistrate John Rehnquist wrote into law something to the effect that the act of operating a motor vehicle means that the driver has consented to voluntary search (and possible seizure) at any police checkpoint. Happened before I was born, but my dad was still in university when it went down. It certified that anyone could reach the levels of the highest court in the land without having the ability to pass a third-grade reading test. Reading comprehension is more important than knowing the law, and Rehnquist knew very little about either.
Unfortunately, the slope continues to steepen, as more mandates are written upon the pile that follow along with past acts of stupidity.
Hi Travis,
I don’t give Rehnquist the benefit of stupidity. The man was a very bright authoritarian who knew exactly what he was doing. His aim was to wax the power of the state.
And he did so.
Nunzio, just when I think I’ve got it bad, you post something to one up me. I’ve got three farmers markets to choose from; all organic. I hit them when my garden is picked clean. The closest one is three miles away, but every Thursday, the flea market has a couple of vendors selling organic produce about a mile away. The last one is about 5 or 6 miles away and has the biggest selection at the best price so I load up when I have to drive that far. I’ve got a few cases of jars for pickling and canning which I will probably get to one of these days before I split.
it’s not just teen drivers it’s all first time drivers that feel the pain of extortion. My 21 year old cousin started driving and liability on his 96 honda civic was 2100 every 6 months!! I helped price shop and still couldn’t find anything lower. That car was barely worth $1500. The Mafia is real! I told him to drive without it. Here in MN it’s mandatory but fully accepted by the DMV that you don’t have it. They are supposed to ask for proof of insurance but will not even look at it when presented. The cops will not be as forgiving. However i was pulled over for not having my lights on in the city at night and the cops didnt even ask for insurance either. So maybe there is some kind of acceptance that most people don’t drive insured.
The Clovers in this thread are making my head hurt.
Real life example with my own child.
16 y/o female – $250,000 of liability and uninsured motorist coverage through a national name brand insurance company, with a discount for home schooled test results indicating a 80th percentile or higher score on standardized tests and a discount for taking an online safety course.
Cost per year? $560 in two six month payments of $280.
Reason: This is in NH, where the insurance mafia does not have state mandate to buy their product. Yes, you read it right, there is no state law requiring insurance.
Therefore there are free market forces at work keeping costs down.
AF, a POIFECT example of how, when no government mandate exists, and thus the free-market can flourish- just how inexpensive things become (Or rather, how expensive they become when we are required to purchase them).
Just that example alone would do someone 10x better than reading any textbook on economics.
When you’re not forced to buy it, it is sold for only as much as the market will bear, instead of a grossly inflated extrotionist price.
Just step across that border line into Taxachoochettes, and that $560 becomes the $3K….but all these young ignoramuses have been propagandized into thinking that free-market economics is “evil”, and that socialism is somehow beneficial, especially to “the poor”… LOL.
Nunz,
Imagine those same forces at work in the field of health care and health insurance.
But no, can’t have that, we want Venezuelan “single payer”.
That’s freeeee.
Freakin idjits…
What are the state-mandated MINIMUMS in “Tax-a-CHOO-Setts”? Here in “Caii(porn)ia”, it’s 15K/30K/5K same as it was 40 years ago. It was a joke then and it’s a farce now if you expect that should some minimally-insured driver cause YOU damage…the only realistic option is to yet tithe the ‘mafia’ even further by purchasing “un/under-insured” coverage. With about 40% of the motoring public not carrying insurance at all, and about half of what’s left having the minimums, you’re driving as “naked” without it, even though the UI/UM coverage is not mandated. So I would postulate: Why mandate coverage at all, save to give the insurance mafia a captive market? It would seem that in truth one picks either UI/UM and/or higher Liability limits, as I do (250K/500K/200K, which don’t actually cost much more than the lower increments, surprisingly) based on a fundamental market decision for insurance…the price of covering oneself against what would be a financially disastrous situation, either by causing an mishap or being the victim of one, and the at-fault party not being realistically able to pay out of their own pocket. Were insurance not mandated in CA, I’d still have it for the above reasons, but likely my premiums would be significantly less.
Of course, there is yet another “Mafia” involved should you be injured and you’re taken to the hospital. If one ever examined so-called “Hollywood accounting” (the practice by which rich Jewish film producers would screw directors and actors out of their agreed-to share of the film’s profits and/or receipts), it has NOTHING on what these hospitals do, whether you’re in their plan or not! I and my now 32 y.o. son (he was 14 at the time) were in a bad rollover accident in early 2000 that totaled my ’89 New Yorker. This accident was caused by a couple of Vietnamese kids driving their father’s old pickup which had but the minimal coverage. Still, my son and I had, after being taken via ambulance, come out of it simply with he having a broken arm (did in his Babe Ruth season that year), and myself suffering a concussion and some ‘road rash’. Both of us were released from the hospital ER early the next AM. When the bill came from Kaiser, it was for MORE than the premium maximums, which they could NOT legally collect from me, but could out of the insurance proceeds! Needless to say, my attorney went to work, so for all practical purposes the insurance payout was divided three ways, with about equal portions for Kaiser, the attorney, and myself. Many folks have this notion that being the victim in a traffic accident is the ticket to “Easy Street”, but as is typical, my experience was that it was scarcely worth the trouble and pain.
In just about every state, the mandated minimums are a joke. I carry about 6x the minimum- it only costs about $20 per year per policy more. Just showing, yet again, where there is no compulsion, there is no extrotion. If the raised the mandated minimums, you can bet that instead of $20 per year more, it would then cost hundreds- if not thousands more.
Just more of the absurdity of government: If the insurance wasn’t mandated, everyone could easily afford to not only carry it, but to carry a realistic amount to both protect themselves, and to truly pay for any damages that they might cause.
Here in Michigan, the “health care industry” charges THREE TIMES the amount if the “victim” is injured because of an auto accident. When you are brought in to the trauma center, you are asked if your injuries were a result of an auto accident. Your insurance company is billed accordingly–at a much higher cost.
I partially agree with the article, but a good portion of the high insurance rates is just because the kid is young and doesn’t know how to get cheap insurance and because the parents don’t know how to help him/her. These kids generally call Geico, Progressive, Allstate, and State Farm, and then throw in the towel and shell out their $3,000. They never seem to hear about the most active non-standard auto carriers such as Kemper Specialty, Dairyland, Gainsco, Suncoast, etc. Then the parents don’t help either. Since the kid doesn’t have any credit history, he’s going to get a “no hit” surcharge. How hard is it for mom and dad to add the kid as an authorized user on a card with 5-10 years’ worth of history? Suddenly the kid’s insurance score is through the roof and he’s got insurance payments on his 2000 Ford for less than $100 a month. Don’t be average, people — be exceptional.
Of course this is really dangerous. Skills that aren’t learned young are never learned as well. When the generation that didn’t drive until their mid-late 20s starts to hit the roads it won’t be pretty.
The best course of action is to have your teen start saving up for a car at about 14 years old, don’t have them get a license until they are about 20 years old, drive them or have them use uber or lyft as needed. A 10 year old car with around 88,000 miles is easy to find, your 20 year old will need between $2500 and $5000 to get a 10 year old car, buy from a private party, best is if they are the cars original owner and have kept maintenance records. A 20 year olds insurance is vastly cheaper, especially if you add them to your family policy. Cars from the year 2000 and up last around 300,000 to 350,000 miles, do your maintenance, or have your trusted mechanic do it. I speak from experience, I’ve done this 3 times with my 3 kids. And I hate to say it but 16 is too young to drive, the roads are crazy too many drivers all over the country in the big cities especially. The driving age should be 18, but I hate mandates and laws as we all have the freedom to travel per our Constitution. However I would like parents to hold off on getting their kids licensed until they are at least 18. Oh and I’m on the west coast if I can buy 3 cars as described above for my kids anyone can do it.
Hi James,
Your points are tactically sound but it still saddens me to think that, in your scenario, a kid remains exactly that – a kid – until he’s 20. Riding with mom and dad; being driven around at 18 and 19 just like he was at 8 or 9.
I disagree abundantly with you on raising the legal driving age to 18. In the first place, it is a dumbing down that presumes all teens are inept and reckless as a collective; it allows for no individual competence or other merit. Everyone must be held to the same least common denominator standard. This is the same thinking that the Safety Cult depends on and which has turned the country into both a police state and a nanny state.
Second, it is another mechanism for infantilizing young adults. In the past, many kids began to operate motor vehicles at 14 or 15 and by 16 many were as or more competent than some adults by the time they reached 18.
Experience is important – and skill is a function of experience. Delaying driving does not make someone a better driver.
Driving does.
Eric wrote:
“Your points are tactically sound but it still saddens me to think that, in your scenario, a kid remains exactly that – a kid – until he’s 20. Riding with mom and dad; being driven around at 18 and 19 just like he was at 8 or 9.”
Not just teenagers, but the increasing number of soyboy manginas being carted around like so many useless, helpless, “lumpenmeatsaks” by wives or girlfriends.
I still do all the driving.
Woemenfolk ride.
In the 1920s 12 year olds could drive. All that mattered was if they could control the vehicle. BTW The work of John Taylor Gatto point out that the permanent adolescence is by design.
Yeah, Brent, in most states in the early years, one just drove- no license or any of that BS. As late as the 40’s and 50’s in some places, you’d just buy a driver’s lic. in the drug store. No test, no nothing- just your name and address, and pay the fee (Well, I think they did have age requirements at that time- but if you were in a place where you were unknown, I doubt it amounted to much more than “How old are you?”.)
And of course, some of the more communistic states, like NY and MA had driver’s licenses and all of the “official” stuff very early on.
Eric, I agree wholeheartedly that we keep teenagers and young adults in a prolonged state of INFANCY. This, IMO, isn’t just caused by ever-increasing insurance premiums that price all but the wealthy from paying for car insurance for their teen drivers. It’s a result of decades of the ever-increasing “Nanny State”, with ever-increasing nosiness, from both cops, so-called “Child Protection advocates”, and, of course, the “Po-leece”, for EVERYTHING involving YOUR kids…and never mind, thanks in no small part due to feminism and the feminization of American culture (e.g., we’re all getting “pussy-whipped”), a disturbing trend to “Helicopter parenting” and keeping children from growing up, asserting themselves, and assuming personal responsibility.
I could drive the family “Truckster” (1968 Chevrolet Bel Air wagon) when I was TWELVE…but in Florida, if you were in a car with your parents or an older sibling whom was licensed and at least 18, you didn’t even need a “learner’s permit”…and, with a permit, rather than a full license, once you’d passed “Driver’s Ed” (which was yet one of the courses ‘taught, by a football coach whom didn’t get the “run the film projector” class on hygiene or some other nonsense like that…), you could drive ALONE during the day to school or work (you had to get a note that you had a school activity or your work hours dictated as much, and no way you were ‘legal past ten on a “school night” or midnight on the weekends), and once you got the full license, you went WHERE you wanted, when you wanted in your ride. I could also perform routine maintenance on the family vehicles by the time I was 14, and did, as my Dad was still in the Air Force and away dropping bombs on monkeys and snakes in Vietnam.
Of course, we didn’t have Game Boys, Play Stations, and similar (my adolescence was just before the Atari 2600 came out, I had just graduated high school when it did), but in addition to being a “motor head”, I did have a ham radio and a chemistry set. Even once, when I was 15, built a stink bomb in the tool shed, and the first test, to put it mildly, grossed out the neighborhood. When the deputy sheriffs responded, he had a hard time giving me a stern lecture, and lost it laughing before he made it back to the squad car! My mother was surprised when the Sheriff himself came by to call the next day..with the then head of the fledgling engineering department at what was then Florida Technological University (now University of Central Florida), they wanted to see this “bomb” that I’d invented! When they learned that it wasn’t just general knowledge, that I’d read some old Air Force tech manuals that my Dad gave me to browse and got quite a few ideas, they were both amazed as well as amused!
James,
What Eric said.
All the people I know who started driving really young, turned out to be the MOST responsible people- both as teenagers, and as adults. There’s a 15 year old girl around here who can drive a crew cab dually pick-up with a 26′ stock trailer better than most adults can drive a car- and can back that trailer anywhere.
15 year olds where I came from (NYC) are babies, who can’t do anything, even when they’re 25.
And a 20 year-old single male newly licensed/without at least 3 years of driving experience gets nailed on insurance premiums just about as bad as a 16 year-old. Living in NYC, I didn’t get my license till I was 20… At any age, you get penalized if you have no prior license and no experience- I think DUI’s getting their licenses back aren’t even penalized as badly.
They’ve got it all figured out. They’re not cutting anyone a break- no matter how “clean” you are.
For years, in my 20’s, my insurance was almost as high as my friend’s- who would total at least one vehicle per year- and always his fault. Meanwhile, I had no accidents or tickets. Yeah, I got a negligible discount. And if it were today, I’d probably be paying more than my careless friend, because I’m a high-school drop-out; and that is now one of the metrics they use to rate young people.
Balderdash!!! My Dad got his driving license on his twelfth birthday.they lived innrural Nevada, but that was statewide at the time. HOW can this be? Easy… kids in those days were raised to be responsible, that actions have consequences, that things are valuable so you don’t go busting them up, and that people deserve to be watched out for and held in VERY high regard, so you can NOT do wnything stupid to hurt them. He’d beenrunning a wagon and team on the farm for a few years, tractors, etc. When he was 14 he was the school bus driver. Yes, at FOURTEEN. How can this be? Easy… already driving for a couple years, and operating farm equipment for much longer than that, AND being responsible and careful of others, why not? His family lived furthest from the school in that direction, so when they bought the bus Dad was the logical choice. During his lifetime he drive well above two million miles, and was INVOLVED on only ome motor vehicle crash…. HE was stopped in traffic on a freeway offramp, someone hit him from behind, busted the round red glass tail lamp lens on his ancient old Austin A 40 Sedan. He picked up the two halves and the fixing ring, asked the guy to give hi ten bucks, and they parted company, anonymously. HE taight all us kids how to drive, and OUR driving records may be peppered with “infractions” (because we KNEW how to drive and what the vehicle could do, and few others did, so the speed limits were a joke and we knew it). To my knowledge none of my eight siblings have ever had any serious accidents… in a few centyries’ worth of driving, collectively. ALL of us got or driving licenses at 15.5, the minimum age in our state.
Part of the problem today is that the mandated “professional driver training” courses required for all kids under 18 are a sick joke. I daily observe the lack of skill, common snese, and even the ability to pay attention and comprehend what is going on about them. No kid of mine will EVER have those clowns be the first source of instruction for their leaning to drive. I wil teach them then let them go torment the “instructors” in the schools. Hah, I’ve even watched some of these marked driving school cars, only the driver aboard, do some pretty stulid/dangerous things out there. HOW on earth will the kids learn from a jerk like THAT? Kids are irresponsible these days because their PARENTS have fobbed them off to daycare, preschool, Sesame Street and the Disney channel and they’ve NEVER learned much about reality. They do not yet grasp there is NO “reset button” in real life. You go too fast into a turn and don’t know what you are about, your car WILL spin out of control and crash.
And the outrageous insurance premiums ARE based, at least loosely, on actuarial tables broken down into rather tight age categories.
Well-said Tionico!
I began driving around 14; most of my friends, too. With parents. They understood the things you’ve written about. They knew that experience matters and that by getting us started years before the government know-it-alls told them a Magic Number had been achieved that they’d have some before the arrived at the government-anointed legal age for driving.
Everything today is premised on misguided least common denominatorism at best and (at worst) on a calculated effort to prevent people from ever truly becoming adults.
And to think that when I was but a lad at the ‘tender’ age of 16, in the fall, we kids would bring our rifles and shotguns to SCHOOL (leaving them in our cars in the parking lot, of course), then head out to go HUNTING once school let out! Just imagine the hue and cry if some kids even brought firearms to school, or were observed out hunting with them without ‘adult’ supervision!
Tionico, those were the days when humans still behaved as humans, because their actions were based on thought, values, and the keeping in mind of the natural consequences or rewards of one’s actions- as opposed to the standard protocol of today, in which most actions are based on obedience to some law that governs what ever action one is engaged in, and or some sound-byte or mnemonic taught by rote- no thought required- just a conditioned response to a given stimuli, like a robot or computer.
Insurance cost depends on state law.
Here any new driver (16 or 20 years old) gets hit with an “inexperienced driver” surcharge for their first 3 years.
Only those acts which injure innocent persons or involuntarily deprive them of the use of their property should be punished as crimes. Applying this concept to driving means the end of license plates, drivers licenses, compulsory insurance and and speed limits, other than those which are advisory only.
Hi David,
Well-said, sir – thank you! The concept of crime – in the moral sense – requires a victim. If there is no victim, an actual person actually harmed in some manner, then there cannot be a crime. “Offenses” and “statutes” which impose harm on people who’ve caused none are crimes – because they create victims.
Libertarianism is fine, if you want to disregard the “human nature” component of society. Whatever you want to do on your property is fine. When you engage with the general public, your freedoms are relative to the like freedoms of others, unless you’re a selfish, petulant “gonna show you” type. Sure, if you’re 12 and physically able to operate a car you should drive wherever you want, right? So where do you draw the line? No licenses? Just freedom to drive down a one way street or without headlights on? Can’t afford tires? Put on bald ones with the belts showing through and when one blows and you careen onto a sidewalk killing kiddies, well…. that’s the cost of freedom. You can have my bald tires when you pry them from my cold, rusty mag wheels.
I’m no fan of mandatory insurance, or drivers licensing. It’s a money funnel to the bureaucracy and its cronies. What I’ve come to accept, is that everyone isn’t like me. I can drive without a DL or insurance, and if I get away with it without hurting anyone, great! Fact is, there are careless, irresponsible dolts out there. Not everyone is responsible or can handle unfettered freedom. So, these corrupt imperfect systems are in place to treat everyone as the lowest common denominator. It’s an inconvenience and can be expensive. The flip side of the coin is casting fate to the “market” where equally greedy and unscrupulous folks will offer solutions to societal problems, for a fee, the only difference being they will be naked charlatans and the others will be clad in the uniform of the state.
As far as insurance for carrying guns in public, I’m all for that. If an unreasonable person incorrectly perceives something to be an imminent threat and starts shooting, and hitting a bystander, they need to pay for the damages. When I carried as a private investigator, I had liability insurance for my weapon in the event I harmed someone. Some Libertarian counterparts argue they have an absolute right to carry whatever weapon they want in public, then they hide behind the 2nd Amendment. If you believe you have an unqualified right, you don’t need to retreat to the Bill of Rights to support your claim. The Bill of Rights was never meant to apply to the people of the several states. They had their respective State constitutions and the Bill of Rights was intended for US persons (see Incorporation Doctrine and Barron v. Baltimore).
This system is a mess. Libertarianism is not a viable solution. Unless there is a huge reset, corporations, crony capitalism, the mercantile “free market”, too-big-to-fail businesses….. every regulation is for igniting a controlled burn for society, because people are largely ignorant, materialistic, selfish, and violent. Leaving the less fortunate or incapable to fend for themselves with that ilk is not something I am willing to dismiss. People, being people, and navigating the human condition will produce those in need of assistance. There are plenty of resources to tap to help people, such as taxing corporations. Corporations are not free market, because they are created under acts of the legislature and are legal persons existing in a preferential status.
Until someone rolls back all the injustice and deceit that got us to this point, the only system we have will have to do and I’ll avoid it as much as I can, and engage it when the cost-benefit of “tithing” comes out in my favor of not having to wage legal battles with it. The laws are there. Don’t want to pay for insurance, don’t. Get caught, and deal with those consequences. Not good, bad, or otherwise. Just the way it is for now. I don’t think mom and pop motors should build cars for sale to the general public. Steering wheels coming off at 75mph is not something that gets me screaming “free market” as I burst into flames after hitting a tree.
People should be regulated as little as possible, and only when mediating competing claims of liberty against others, but businesses (corps), protections for the environment, commerce, labor…. are to keep societal bottom feeders at bay in exchange for bureaucratic bottom feeders. At least bureaucratic bottom feeders are easier to identify and take to court for malfeasance.
Randall, I like your ideas……since that’s the way I grew up and hurt no one. I was 12 years old driving where and when I wanted. I never had a wreck and was several times as competent as almost anyone of “driving age”. We had insurance….for all our vehicles and drivers and it didn’t cost shit.
I had a rifle rack in the pickup I drove and was armed all the time. I will admit I didn’t get my first handgun till I was 14 and that was mail-order. I didn’t hurt anyone with that gun either. I was ready to hurt someone but people weren’t given to hurting each other back in those times and the few “peace officers” that existed weren’t keen on hurting anyone either.
My best friend and I were both 12, well, he was 11, and we’d drive 60 miles in the ranch pickup to a large town to buy fishing stuff and shooting stuff and race our electric track cars. We didn’t break speed limit law so we were never stopped by cops. There was no “harm” done to anyone or “society”. It was trickier to buy alcohol but we did it, drank it and drove and never had a problem.
I just wrote a comment about having a “reset”. I think we’re headed that way. Nearly 60 years ago the things that are verboten now weren’t even on anyone’s list back then. Was there crime? Not to speak of. People were armed. Rarely did you see a west Tx. pickup without a 3 rifle rack full and generally a handgun or two. I don’t recall people ever shooting each other. Rifles were for game and so were handguns. We “needed” firearms….and still do but now not strictly for varmints and predators….in the old sense of the terms.
Eight, of course no one shot each other….when everyone has a gun, a miscreant or bully has no superior power over anyone, but rather just faces the prospect of being blown away by ten different people if gets out of line.
That’s why there was no crime, no mass shootings, no brutality- everyone was on an equal footing- the way it should be.
All these little bitches talking about “equality” these days, but their equality isn’t equality. They don’t want real equality, as described above.
Sadly, there’ll be no reset. Most of the people alive today are ignorant that such a way of life ever existed. The young’uns are told that those prehistoric times of the 50’s and 60’s were “terrible” times, and that niggers were routinely lynched, and women beaten daily, and that not everyone loved men who took it in the ass…..
And half the people even your age or older, who grew up in the big cities, are even ignorant of such a way of life- they think that that went extinct in the “wild west” in the 19th century, before the “civilizing” effect of cities and FDR’s commie programs made the world into the wonderful, free, crime-free place it is now…LOL (Yes, they are dreamers)
Growing up we didn’t lock our doors….or our vehicle doors and commonly left the keys in the ignition.
It was common for someone(and it might be you)to go to someones door(maybe yours) and knock on it and if they didn’t get an answer, just open it and sit a gift down on the floor and leave. You’d come home to cantaloupes and watermelons on the porch, not knowing who’d left them. Probably a day or two later you’d find out. I’ve left all sorts of vegetables at people’s houses. Sometimes, in the case of dropping off some fresh meat you might need to go in and leave it in the fridge which wasn’t a problem since the door wasn’t locked.
Since DL’s were issued at 14 you’d probably been practicing driving since you were 6, a not uncommon thing, esp for boys back then. I got my first lesson in driving a big rig……from my aunt….when I was 10. My uncle was off on the road but probably he’d told my aunt to teach me how.
In school, I learned more from Ag class than any other class. I learned to do all sorts of welding…and gas cutting and brazing. I learned all types of wood work from making a book case to farrowing crates to building a fence or barn.
I learned to survey in that class. I learned about all sorts of diseases of animals and people and how to do surgery, minor and not so minor. By the time I was 18 I’d castrated 100s of animals and done some surgery on some too. I could ride and rope and brand and vaccinate and would all day long and longer if need be.
We learned to identify all sorts of plants and judge land. How to operate tractors and other equipment doing all sorts of plowing and planting and harvesting.
My grandfather was a great mule-skinner and could literally talk an animal into doing what he wanted. He didn’t use a whip, maybe a dead careless weed and that was for show. He taught me to de-horn….whatever required it and the difference between castrastion of hogs, cattle, horses and sheep and how to dock a tail, how to sheer a sheep and clip a calf or hog.
He taught me to dig wells, build fence of all sorts, hand harvest some crops, plant them and till them, how to shock feed and row up peanuts.
My uncles taught me all sort of things about trucking and the loading and unloading of all sorts of things.
In Ag Class we learned Robert’s Rules of Law and how to conduct a meeting and went to at least regional in UIL doing it every year. We went to livestock shows and learned the ins and outs of it and how to breed those animals we owned and showed and how to be a man doing it. We learned how to repair all sorts of equipment and got to use our fabrication classes in doing so.
I had some really good teachers of most everything including English and Literature, Mathematics and Chemistry, Texas Law, typing, slide rule and contests for such. We had some excellent music teachers and band directors.
But one thing we seemed to learn in every class and every competition and of being on the road was ethics. Honesty was simply assumed. Helping others in need required no more thought than identify those in need and stopping to help.
Growing up hitch-hicking was something I thought little of….in either giving a ride or sticking out a thumb. I’ve had many an enjoyable trip either picking up someone or being given a ride. I’ve even been taken to people’s houses while they did something they had to do and then been taken home, many miles out of their way and I have done the same. We’ve taken in people who broke down on the road and put them up for the night, feeding them and giving them drink and whatever we had they may have enjoyed. Too many times working for companies that really didn’t give a shit about rescuing you when your truck broke down I ‘d simply grab my kit, put out my thumb standing at the rig and often catch a ride all the way home, even when people went out of their way to get me there.
Damned if it ain’t a different world now and I’d turn back 60 years in a heartbeat if possible.
Morning, Eight!
Bits and pieces of the world you describe still exist in my neck. People don’t lock up here, either – and I routinely come home to find a present of the sort you describe. All my friends know they can pop in anytime, whether I am home or not. If they need a tool or some other thing, they know where it is. Same for me and them.
Part of the reason is cultural. People here are still mostly like the people I knew as a kid, growing up in Northern Va. (they are not like that anymore, unfortunately). People know one another – and keep an eye out, too. People who do not belong – whose truck is that? – get noticed. And I think the fact that outsiders know that pretty much everyone around here is well-armed keeps those outsiders in check.
Obvious is the point, and Throw Your Plate Away Day is the right idea. Millions do it at once. Coordinate the millions like the Free State projects did, with a pseudonymous signup promising simultaneous action on a future date if millions do sign up.
Let’s ignore values and internal monologue for a moment and consider results. From the outside, a libertarian who obeys bad laws is indistinguishable from a liberal. You think different, but you behave the same. Not registering guns in Connecticut in 2014 and California in 2018, at the risk of felonies, is disobedience. I’m not seeing any similarly material amount of disobedience anywhere in the US, except for gun registration.
You’re not fighting a mental illness, you’re fighting the great ape/monkey troop political instincts which human brains genetically inherited from their ancestors. About 1 in 100 humans are born freethinkers, which means these instincts are weaker in them and they work out for themselves what the moral rules should be.
Technology is a force multiplier, technology overall favors decentralization of power, and technology itself is growing faster than exponential. Imagine if the chemist from Breaking Bad didn’t make horrible abuse drugs, but instead made Claymore mines? How would that show’s plot have gone?
Anonymous, You are either an agent of the State trying to foment militia action, are an ignorant newbie libertarian, and/or a liar!:
“Millions do it at once. Coordinate the millions like the Free State projects did, with a pseudonymous signup promising simultaneous action on a future date if millions do sign up.”
I took part in the early days of the formation of the Free State Project before a state had even been chosen! The Free State Project was not at all “pseudonymous”, made no promises based upon “millions” of future members, and only coordinated the advertising. The goal was to get 20,000 people (not “millions”) to promise to move into a given state with-in 5 years once it had been selected. Other states were nominated, and the people like myself who had voted for a non-winning state were allowed to withdraw. There was no way that I was going to move to a northeastern state having high costs of living (compared to the midwest) and living beside heavily populated Yankee states!
It still took them longer than 5 years to reach the 20,000 mark, but I really, really do applaud their many other accomplishments!
I didn’t intend my phrasing to imply either of the Free State projects attempted to have millions of members, but I see how you can read it that way. The New Hampshire Free State Project had a lot of signups which didn’t use their legal names, it was pseudonymous. Both Free State projects were utter failures. There was no material quantity of liberty produced. The grand achievement of getting occupational licensing laws repealed for haircutting and nail salons
On the other hand, I think millions removing their license plates, AND KEEPING THEM OFF, AND NOT REDUCING THEIR DRIVING, AND NOT TOLERATING PENALTIES, would actually make a difference. A pseudonymous signup to an onion web site is a fine way to organize that.
Why haven’t millions of you taken your license plates off? This community of readers continue to OBEY these rules. So long as you OBEY they can do ANYTHING. I picture you writing a stern letter to your elected representative typing on a phone with one hand, while the other hand is handcuffed into the boxcar. Prediction from history is that you will never stop obeying soon enough, while you still have freedom enough, to avoid life-changing consequences.
Hi Anonymous,
I haven’t taken off my plates – too obvious… but I have several vehicles which I’ve not renewed the registration of in years. This has saved me several hundred bucks, each – at least!
And if they’re just ‘rusting in peace’ on your property, then that’s what you should be able to do, no different than the old Lafayette Ham receiver that my Dad gave me in 1970 still just gathers dust in my garage attic…and my couch rarely, if ever, gets sat upon. Does even Cali(porn)ia inquire as to whether or not I’m actually USING any of my property? Yet, if I want to keep an old hulk on my property, not only will I have to pony up precious bucks (“non-operating” FEE) and to de-list them as insured vehicles, but Placer County is completely in my business…it’s one thing to not leave a derelict vehicle on stands in the driveway, I can see not allowing it to become an outright eyesore in a semi-residential neighborhood. However, even with a high privacy fence around the immediate back yard, and considerable ‘privacy’ shrubbery at the periphery of the property, I still can’t just lay down some Vis-Queen and drop some sand and gravel to make a parking area for my ‘projects’. In fact, even in the garage, which has 3 bays, I’m not supposed to keep a derelict vehicle, so any work on the 1966 Plymouth has to be done without ever opening the garage door to view. I suppose that I could pay the considerable permit fees and put up a building (forget just getting a Butler building, even hidden from view that won’t be allowed per the local CCRs) to house all that iron I’d like to have. So…the long range plan is to acquire a ranchette in Nevada, which is still part of ‘Murica…probably somewhere between Carson City and Fallon.
There already are life changing consequences in many places. Just look at an incident or two that happened to people with valid licensing from Canada.
Driving without plates is I believe possible but requires a lot time spent “educating” cops and so forth. It’s just impractical when one has to deal with many different departments and government entities. Especially when such uppity behavior gets people killed.
Now there is one thing to consider. Issuing one’s own plates. However these days some cops can’t even grasp the legality of driving into the USA from Canada it probably won’t work well.
Anonymous,
That’s ridiculous. Living in a police state surrounded by several million unaccountable armed goons who are equipped with the latest technology, and where the majority of the 300 million mundanes around us support this BS, and would gladly give their assent to throw you in a cage for “non-compliance” and or take everything you’ve got (No matter how unjust the law, they see Uncle as their benefactor and protector, and are also jealous of anyone who manages to break free of the stupid rules which they have to obey -“Who does he think HE is? Does he think he is special, that we all have to do X, but he doesn’t?! I’ll show him!”).
We’re not just fighting a government. We’re fighting a mental illness, which has been acquired by the majority of our neighbors. The same thing happens to those here who do not comply, as to those in Nazi Germany. A tiny minority seeking liberty and justice would not even be noticed.
The only real solution is to extricate oneself from the jurisdiction of the tyrants. To leave for a freer place- just as the intelligent Germans did’ just as our forefathers did when they left England to come here. It’s WAY too late for resistance- non-violent, or otherwise. This should have been done 100 years ago- then maybe it would have had a chance- but our fathers were too busy voting for communists who would rob the “rich” and redistribute it to them- not realizing that they were voting for their own and their children’s enslavement.
I know what you mean though. I too am sick of hearing the complaining by those who choose to stay here, while the door is still wide open. I mean, why preach the virtues of liberty and lament tyranny….while you choose to tolerate the tyranny because it may be inconvenient to extricate yourself? I’ll just NEVER understand it.
But your way is even worse, Anonymous. One sees these people who drive without plates, or with homemade plates, etc. All they do is spend a lot of time in jails and courts, and have a lot of interaction with the SS. The thing to do while still in the police state, is to AVOID interaction with the SS.
Get caught “not complying” with any of this BS today, just one time, and it WILL end up costing you thousands of dollars. Your insurance will go WAY up. You will be charged fees and fines, and will likely need a lawyer (a few grand right there); your vehicle will likely be impounded…- in short, you’ll be paying for years to come.
tl;dr version: Being a scofflaw in a police state accomplishes absolutely nothing.
Nunz, it is a “mental illness”. It’s takem a 100 years to develop but it’s in full bloom. Just look at the leftists and the crazy shit they believe. They have no logical grasp of freedom or anything else including history. We need lots more phenobarbital since mass euthanasia would seem to be the only recourse.
They could probably be sold on becoming soylent green and I’d be happy to help with my 3/4″ X 24″ piece of rebar. Just a little tap and they’d be smilin as Billy Joel “nearly” said.
One scenario I’m seeing more and more lately, is parents [And I’m talking lower working class] putting the kid(s) on their insurance, and just paying the increased premiums, or just flat-out paying for the kid’s insurance. This is becoming especially common in places where one needs to drive (Basically anywhere outside of large metro areas/hipsterland).
Not only is this ridiculous, but it is further going to delay the maturing process, more so than it already is now, where we already have 30 year-olds who still live at home and act like little boys and play video games.
I know of one fambly with 2 teenage boys. The parents are paying the kid’s insurance AND giving them gas money (One parent is on the back-pain dole; the other works a crap low-paying job- and has taken extra hours), and both boys have girlfriends who each live an hour away, and one of the boys can never keep a job for more than a few days….
This is just another crack in the dam of this society, whose collapse is imminent- but which will just make it that much more spectacular.
Amen, Nunz… I was thinking similar thoughts as I tried to compose a memoriam to The Bandit… he died last week and almost no one noticed.
eric, Mr. Burt dead? I didn’t see it. I was hoping he’d outlive me although I’m not keen on dying soon. I know they won’t fit me but reckon those 6″ lift boots are for sale? S and the B 2. Good luck on a fitting send-off to Mr. Burt. He was the very iteration of “iconic”.
Probably I can take this as my not living forever too…..crap. I have another lifetime of “stuff” to do. RIP Mr. Burt, Pontiac(RIP)will surely miss you too. BTW, Sally’s very sad also.
Was the man ever in a good movie?
Maybe it was because I was a kid when I saw them, but I liked the Smokey and the Bandit movies as well as the Gator and White Lightening movies, and who can forget Deliverance? I think the production value of the movies he did was pretty low budget, and that it was his stage presence that made up for it. He looked the part of the renegade.
I can still remember seeing him as an Indian getting ready to scalp someone in an old black and white episode of something like Gunsmoke. They say that he was going bald even back then.
Shnark, I forgot about Deliverance. I’ll give him some credit for that!
I remember seeing Smokey & The Bandit when I was c. 14 at Radio City Music Hall- my aunt took me. Well….what 14 year-old doesn’t love car chases? Plus I thought Sally Field was hot at the time. (Yeah, my taste in women was pretty bad back then!)
I was just glad to see Jackie Gleason in it though. Any self-respecting teenager brought up on late-night re-runs of the Honeymooners just HAD to see a movie what contained ol’ Ralph Kramden!
If ONLY the cops were actually like “Buford T. Justice”…then we could just LAUGH at them. Even Buford wouldn’t open up a can of whoop-ass unless you richly ‘deserved’ it!
Well, Doug, many of ’em sure do look a lot like ol’ Buford; and they do seem to operate at about the same level of competence…..
Growing up in a rural area one required a car to go work at all, still does. Average commute 45 minutes if you can’t drive you can’t work. The insurance mafia and police state have destroyed more than a few lives by robbing hard working people who made minor mistakes. Yet we tolerate, even demand more police,insurance and bailout auto makers, banks, and insurance mafiosos.
Hi Nomadic,
Yup, exactly. I do what I can to point out to people that most of what they decry is either caused by or made worse by government – and that calls for more government aren’t going to make things better and will usually create new problems.
The stupid in this article gets going really early. First, $3,000 / year for insurance is for certain on the far high end of what a teen would pay for liability-only coverage on a car appropriate for a teen driver. Most likely this exaggerated figure includes both kids who have been bought a brand new $30k car (in and of itself, stupid parenting), being male, and probably already having had one reported accident thus proving oneself to actuaries as a bad bet.
Secondly, this doofus starts comparing rates in the ’80’s with today’s rates. Inflation? Hello? As a libertarian one would think he would be acquainted with this factor.
He is right about one thing: kids these days are not as universally ready to drive and have the freedom that comes with it, as we were back in the 80’s for example. There are a several reasons for this and I think they are all cultural, having little to do with money.
The issue of being required by law to carry insurance is a separate argument and is only tangentially related to this issue. I don’t believe in the 80’s in IL we were required by law to carry insurance but my parents had it anyway because, you know, legal liability – that’s what responsible people do.
Clover,
And you are a Clover – because you begin your “argument” (such as it is) with insults rather than facts – note that I very specifically quoted the average cost of insurance (and included a graph and a link to go with). You apparently can’t read, either. Another Clover characteristic!
Well Eric, name calling your readers when they disagree with you is a bad habit. Your chart hardly negates his point. Rates vary considerably depending on your state, zip code, driving record, sex,coverage etc. And I suspect most teens get on the parent’s insurance for a lot less.
Also your point about not having insurance “is the same” as driving drunk on the sidewalk is of course wrong. But I won’t call you any names. DUIs in most places are extremely harsh for penalties and usually worse if you are under 21. Huge fines and loss of license for starters, or even some jail time. By contrast no insurance, at least in Texas, can be dismissed in court by providing proof of insurance, or a small fine. What is often done is getting a one month policy (covering the current month w/ the ticket) and paying a couple hundred bucks or less. While things have changed in the past 30 years we aren’t in N. Korea yet. The kids figure out the system.
Also, if you’ve ever been hit by a “teen” or illegal w/o insurance, what is your recourse? Damage and injuries driving dangerous equipment shouldn’t be a matter of luck of the draw. I sympathize w/ your point about kids not driving. But not unaffordable for most. Some risk having no insurance too. Better hope you don’t discover that the hard way. Urban millennials seem to think it is hip to Uber, bike, rent scooters, skate, etc. The 50s hot rod era is long gone for teens. Why should old guys like us worry about today’s teens? Worry more about them driving while texting, drunk, high or stupid and hitting you w/o insurance…
The first teen I was hit by had insurance. I had to settle for my car not being repaired correctly. The next teen didn’t have insurance, hit my other car. His parents paid for it to be repaired correctly. Another collision was caused by a kid darting into my lane and slamming on the brakes immediately after cutting me off. I just gave up trying to collect from his insurance. Was my winter beater car I got for free. I just sold the car.
I’ve also been hit by people who wanted to avoid going through their insurance again the outcome was better than with it. It’s just so much easier. The only insurance that was easy for me to deal with was when someone rear ended me with a company vehicle. They just cut me a check for a body shop estimate. A few hours work and I removed the little dent in paintless manner and got lucky at the Upull for a bumper.
So mandatory insurance doesn’t seem IME to be worth all that much. Which has been the law since before I started driving.
The fines are huge for no insurance in Illinois. $500 or more. It was $500 a long long time ago I haven’t kept up on how steep it has gotten. Now of course there are ways to get it dismissed but some people wiggle out of their first DUI cheaply too. All punishment and enforcement is selective. 26 over can be 6 months in jail in this state but I haven’t heard of anyone going to jail for it. (BTW 26 over in some areas/times of the interstates in my area is about 3mph more than the 85th percentile.
PS: Clover is a classification here.
Brent, I wouldn’t doubt if IL is like NY- as it has become just as Nazified.
In NY, if you drive without insurance (or just let a registration lapse, even if you’ve sold the car) not only do they charge you a big fine (have no idear how how much) but they charge you a fee per day of lapsed coverage, equivalent to very expensive insurance (i.e. not the rate that you would pay on your insurance)- 20 years ago it was $18 per day. I can only imagine what it is today…
And then as a bonus, your actual insurance goes up for having been “an uninsured driver”- even if you sold the car, or maintained insurance and just let the reggie lapse, because your insurance is deemd null and void if your reg. lapses.
They get you 6 different ways.
So they make people pay for this mythical per-day insurance coverage retroactively….and yet if someone without insurance hits you, where is that mythical coverage? I’ve never seen the state jump in and say “Oh, we maintain a policy for anyone whose insurance has lapsed, which we charge them for retroactively”!
What a farce.
If you or I operated in a such a manner, we would be put under the jail…..
Brent you are a good storyteller and would be a lot of fun around a campfire
muggles, at first this didn’t make any sense to me, but I think you’re quite perceptive in pointing out that this generation isn’t our generation, and they don’t have the values we have, or had as we grew up. It’s a completely different culture. The socialize through social media. They would rather text than travel five or ten miles and visit with someone face to face. Perhaps they’re more responsible in preferring to text than drive, or do drugs rather than drive. Perhaps they can see that it just isn’t worth the hassle to get a car only to start getting hassled by government shake down artists. Perhaps they can see that if they were to fight back they would only end up in jail or dead while the law enforcement personnel walks free. With mostly minimum wage job available, spending all of your income on a car is idiotic. Parts of the US are quickly becoming a third world country where things like automobiles are luxury items.
Morning, Schnarkle!
I don’t disagree with Muggle’s evaluation of the reasons for the declining interest among teens for cars and driving. But that’s just my point. The system is systematically discouraging driving among teens. Whether this is inadvertent or deliberate ultimately doesn’t matter. A generation of Eloi is being reared.
morning eric, I think the percentage of teens that are affected by government regulations is minimal. They simply don’t know what they’re missing. They can make a few clicks with their mouse on a computer and have whatever they want delivered or drop shipped right to their parents front door without ever missing a shot on their Mortal Combat video game. There was a time when kids routinely brought there guns to school so they could go hunting on the way home, and how many of us feel we were ripped off because we didn’t have a horse growing up?
I think it’s still legal to ride a horse within city limits in most cities. I’ve never seen anyone clean up after a horse while they were riding in a city.
If you go online you can find horses that can still be ridden for free, and healthy horses aren’t all that expensive either. Does the government require liability insurance, registration, or licensing to ride a horse? I don’t think there are any smog control devices mandated for horses yet. I’m tempted to see what the local laws are like around here to see if I would have to clean up after a horse if it drops a load in front of city hall.
Hi Schnarkle,
Two of my good friends have teenage boys; one of these is my protege – the kid with the VW Beetle. He knows what he’s missing. And I do all I can to remedy that!
The other kid is mired in video gaming and the effing Internet. He’s morose, bored and sullen.
I wonder why…
Hey eric, I haven’t played a video game since I was in grade school, but I think I may be spending too much time searching online. It’s so convenient. I keep telling myself that once I’ve got my life in order, I’ll disconnect. I think all of this “smart” tech is making me sullen, morose, and bored as well. The more time I spend outside doing what I want, the better I feel, but I’m not the one to tell teens how to live their lives. They have their addictions, and I have mine.
There was a case in Florida last year where a woman was arrested on a DUI for riding a horse while she was drunk. Don’t know how it turned out, but there it is.
Hey Nunzio, recumbent trikes don’t seem to as popular in congested traffic. When you look over, and your head is already about even with the tires of most cars, and below a truck’s tire, even with a flag waving, you aren’t likely to feel all that safe. You have to be half crazy to ride a regular bike in New York city. Trikes take up a bit more room as well so they’re not popular when there’s a lot of traffic.
Hahaha! Shnark, I’m just picturing a ‘bent (trikes, no less) in Manhattan traffic! Bow THAT’D indeed be a sight! Don’t even see ’em *trikes or bikes) in the ‘burbs, or the big parks, where there are miles of trails.
That’s the cool thing about a roadbike in the city- you’re higher than many cars! Guess that’s why I acquired my love of road cycling the first time I rode a real roadbike in Manhattan!
Dude I have a 4000 dollar Volvo zero tickets or any infractions whatsoever I’m male and have “top notch” driving yet I’m paying 300 a month
Thanks for the back-up, YDNK!
My protege is paying $250/month on a basic policy for a ’73 VW Bug…
My best friend is 68 and pays $3000 a year for a 2012 Camry hybrid. The car was in his wife’s name when she died. Insurance just raped him on it and he has had no tickets and no accidents, a perfect driving record. His wife wasn’t paying nearly that much. Of course this is comprehensive but it’s still highway robbery.
The insurance racket varies widely from state to state. While I get soaked for some things in Illinois the auto insurance racket isn’t nearly as bad as other states. I couldn’t afford my small fleet in some states. Less than half for all four than what people in some states would pay for one.
When I was a kid, we were all ripping around getting drunk and getting into wrecks. Half of my friends had 4×4’s and just about every other weekend someone would crash or roll their truck. If they could still drive it, we’d all stand around and check out the damage on Monday morning before school started. The rich kids could take it down to the body shop and get it fixed while the rest of us had dent pullers, dollies, etc. or became experts at spreading Bondo.
What I’ve seen is kids who want to work and make money, make more than enough to not only afford the insurance, they get really nice cars. The kids that have no desire to work, have no desire for wheels either. They sit around and play video games, and walk or ride their bikes to wherever they want to go.
There are a lot of motorized bicycles putting around now as well. The kits from China start out at around $150.00, but you have to tear them down and make sure they’re ready to go before running them. They aren’t put together that well, but once you’ve got them put together the way they’re supposed to be, they run great. Some will get as much as 200 mpg. No license, no insurance, no registration required.
Fairly reliable used cars can be had for a few hundred dollars with stickers good for close to a year. Make sure everything works correctly, use your signals, and don’t speed, and you’ll most likely get by without insurance or even registering it in your name. At the end of the year, sell, or walk away from it.
From time to time, I give some people rides to the local food pantries, and most of the people going to these things are driving up in pretty nice, and relatively late model cars. I guess when your grocery and clothing bill is nothing, you can afford to drive a nice car.
I saw a guy the other day zipping along in a motorized recumbent trike, and decided to look into what one of those things costs. They’re thousands of dollars, but here again you can peddle them and the engines are cheap. The absence of insurance, registration and the great fuel economy more than makes up for the purchase price. They handle great and look pretty sharp too.
Recumbent bikes are pretty much customs. There is no mass market for them so they cost. That’s the only reason they are so expensive. That and if you’re going to get something like that you might as well spend the money and make it nice. If more people liked them there would be cheaper options like regular bicycles.
Brent, you can buy a new one for $500.00 which is what you’d pay for a half way decent bicycle. The top of the line ICE are around 4 or 5k, but there are plenty of brands that are around 1 to 2k new. The trails are full of them. There are just as many of them as there are regular bikes. The relief your back feels is worth the extra few bucks. One of the electric models will do 85 mph.
If you want a good quality bike, trike, etc. you’re going to have to pay a little more than what you’d pay at Walmart for some cheap crap from China.
I haven’t see maybe one or two recumbents in the wild a year. Never saw two the same.
Sounds like you need to get out more BrentP. Perhaps you live in a sparsely populated area? I’m from California (Clover central) where bicycling is a way of life for many. Recumbent bicycles never became a fad, but the recumbent trikes are far more popular, and all the bike shops carry most of the brands as well as a few of their models in stock.
Here in Florida there are just as many trails as California, and the recumbent bikes and trikes are really popular with the elderly, but also becoming popular with younger generations as well. The fact that there are so many models should tell you that they’re not so exotic as you might think. There are off road models, touring models, racing models, tandem models, etc. Out here you routinely see whole groups of people zipping by on them. The bike trails around here can get you from one end of the county to the other and they’re connected to other counties as well. I could probably ride a bike from the panhandle all the way to Marco Island or Miami on these trails.
The weekends are especially crowded around here, and when the snowbirds get down here the volume of bikes and trikes almost doubles.
There’s a guy I see at the local library who doesn’t look like he has two cents to rub together. He’s been riding a bike probably for the last twenty years. He’s well into his 70’s, and just bought a 5k Ice trike. There’s another woman who is also living off her social security check who has one as well. The roads and trails around here are almost perfectly level; very few hills so a bike, doesn’t require strenuous peddling to get anywhere.
I’ve been a lot places in the US, biked a lot of places. They are still a rare site. Illinois is flat lands and still they are pretty rare to see. Bike stores very rarely have one. Then again I learned to hate bicycle stores as a kid and do all my own work. But sometimes I still have to wander into one for a part.
Of CA I’ve only been to LA and the agricultural area around Sacramento and Stockton.
Chances are that if trikes are rare so are bikes. Wherever you see lots of bikes you’ll see lots of trikes. The town I grew up in has a couple of bike shops, but you don’t see a lot of people biking because it just isn’t all that popular. The town I live in now is less than 1/5 the size of my home town, and yet they have two bike shops, one which has just as many trikes as bikes, the other has more trikes than bikes, and half the bikes are trade ins for trikes. They have nothing but trikes sitting out front. The major appeal is comfort and speed. The top of the line racing bike can’t keep up with a trike coasting downhill. They’re lighter, and present less wind resistance to the rider so they’re much easier to ride. They’re less effort to peddle faster. Old geezers who ride a couple times a week can routinely leave seasoned competitive bikers who are out 4 or 5 times a week sprinting in their dust. It’s hilarious to watch some old guy who looks like he’s just reclining in his lazy boy zip past some young guy in peak condition who is probably training for a race.
I misspoke earlier. You can pick up a cheap model at Walmart for around $350.00 So they are effectively the same price as bikes. Price a top of the line racing bike and you’ll find that they’re the same price as trikes as well.
People who have done a lot of touring on a bike will usually point out the problems they have with back pain, butt pain, soreness in their wrists, arms, hands, numbness etc. None of these symptoms present themselves while riding around in a lazy boy. None of this stuff is custom anymore. You can walk into a trike shop and pick it up off the rack. Google “recumbent trikes” and look at all the stuff out there. This stuff has been around for over twenty years. Watch some of the videos on youtube of these old guys racing around, or going down hills at 40 or 50 mph. These guys aren’t in as good of shape as the traditional bike enthusiast because they’re not working half as hard, but they’re having twice as much fun.
My 33 year old neighbor rides with a lot of people, such as myself twice his age. I don’t recall seeing a recumbent bike for a couple years and that was on the service road on I 20 with gear hanging off it like a transient headed somewhere.
Plenty of bikes back in NY….and I have NEVER seen a ‘bent in real life. (Well, not the wheeled variety; plenty of the two-legged kind, though 😀 )
I always wanted to try a ‘bent, just to see what it’s like- but I still enjoy a good aggressive roadbike position- with my seat being about 5″ higher than my bars- only downside is, if I hit something, I may fall through my asshole and break my neck.
Always wanted to try a pennyfarthing too. I used to ride a unicycle when I was in my early teens; it don’t seem right that I’ve never had the experience of riding a ‘bent or a high-wheel…..
If I had my way, auto insurance would be assigned to the driver, as one cannot drive two cars at the same time. Insurance would be tied to the driver’s license, not vehicles.
This would be more equitable than the present system, where most people that have multiple vehicles, but can only drive one vehicle at a time…
Hi Anarchyst,
If I had my way, insurance would be like most other services and products; one could buy it if one wished to do so. Forcing people to carry car insurance is an obnoxious, anti-freedom concept and extremely dangerous because it set the precedent for forcing people to buy health insurance, which has set the precedent for what will probably come next: Forcing people to buy life and gun and home insurance (even if the home is fully paid-for).
The same reasons – someone might cause harm/incur losses on “society” – apply just as logically.
Yes, I understand that not carrying insurance entails risk. That is the price of freedom.
I would much rather live in a society where people were free to assume risk rather than one in which harm imposed on all is a certainty.
“The same reasons – someone might cause harm/incur losses on “society” – apply just as logically.”
Yes, if one accepts that line of reasoning – that if people aren’t forced to buy some stuff we all suffer, or if people are forced to pay for other stuff we all benefit – then any expenditure or forced purchase can be justified.
Hey, if they give me a new car every six months, I promise I’ll spend my time driving around instead of robbing liquor stores and retirees. You might be my next victim, so give me the keys now!
A few weeks ago a friend totaled her car running into the back of one that was stopped with no lights in the dark of night. She had a witness who came to her aid. The cops come, determine the occupants of the car without lights were illegal aliens, cut them loose and she ends up with a totaled car…..and that’s how it goes these days with illegals.
Tongue firmly in cheek, sort of….
Sounds like the smart thing to do is burn your papers, buy (or steal) a beater and BE FREE!
Hi Eight,
This happens here, often. And of course, no insurance… don’t these people know about mandatory coverage laws?
eric, Va. and Tx. have very similar law, unfortunately for all of us. People go to jail every day, in vast numbers for non-jailable crimes….such as no insurance, no DL, etc. But illegals aren’t held to any standard so they go on their merry way while legal citizens pay the bills…..for everything the illegals need or do. We live in Bizarro world. You can blame it on Democrats….and no doubt they have plenty blame coming, but the Tx. Lege is Republican controlled. So how does it work they don’t have the balls to go against the fed on anything?
And the more illegals that are not only allowed to vote but encouraged to do so, vote for the leftists who want open borders, open borders and laws you and I have stuck up our ass in every way, most of all, financially.
Even without the lights on the lenses are reflectors.
But yeah I’ve heard of illegals being above the law in many respects.
Eric, your logic about being “free to take risks” in a free society should only apply to you and your own property. No one forces you to buy coverage for damage on your car or your injuries. The law is for liability for people YOU crash into. That isn’t a risk you should be able to foist on others just because you are too cheap. So don’t conflate third party damages with your own “risk” taking.
Since I assume you aren’t a huge fan of lawyers and courts, w/o insurance the only way to get paid when you are hit by others is to go to court and hope there is something you can “win” from the other drivers. Good luck with that.
Oy vey…
Using your logic, gun owners should also be required to carry insurance in order to carry a gun beyond the perimeter of their property. For that matter, what about “fist insurance”? After all, I am a big guy; I might lose control and punch someone in the face. What then?
Your argument – for the umpteenth time – amounts to imposing harm (costs, punishment) on people who’ve not caused any harm but because you worry they might. I’ve not harmed anyone – or their property – over the past 25 years. Yet on account of people like you, I have been robbed of more than $25,000. Where did that money go, eh? It certainly did not go to pay for any damages caused by me. Is this just? How so?
Your fear of possible risk does not entitle you to actually harm me.
Also – and of a piece with “gun control” laws – mandatory insurance laws do not prevent people from driving without insurance. They merely impose higher costs on the people who are responsible and not the problem.
There needs to be a way to guarantee that a wronged party is justly compensated. It seems only just. But…
After four decades of driving, never having a single insurance claim against me, I feel quite screwed. Even with a perfectly clean record, every possible discount, zero coverage, living in the second lowest cost region, for a 20+ year old $1500 vehicle, I pay just under $1000/year today.
Eric’s number made me consider my lifetime (vehicle) insurance costs. Never insured a vehicle newer than 15yo, usually 4door, sometimes a truck or bike too. Always the minimal possible coverage.
1980s – $12,000
1990s – $13,500
2000s – $11,000
2010s – $14,000 (so far)
So, I am with Eric. Where did that money go? Why was it not in escrow to be returned, say, if I drive responsibly and never cause an accident? What did I get for my money?
BTW Eric
“Your fear of possible risk does not entitle you to actually harm me.”
Succinct. Brilliant.
Put that on a t-shirt. I’ll want one.
One for guns, one for insurance, one for cops…….
Same here, Cold Frog!
I’ve spend more on insurance in my 36 years of driving, than on any other single thing in my life- despite the fact that I’ve never incurred a liability; never even gotten so much as a moving violation (And imagine if I could see worth a darn?!)
All that money…gone forever. No value, other than to satify some bureaucrap.
(Would’ve been less, but I spent the first 2/3’s of my life in NY… Now, in BFE, ins. “only” costs me $300 a year for EACH vehicle. And why do I have to insure EACH vehicle, when can only drive one at a time, and live alone, and only drive maybe 3K miles per year? )
Oops. My ‘clean record’ could be misinterpreted.
Craploads of seriously crazy speeding tickets (bike) in the ’80s&’90s, when the cop caught up dozens of miles later, was pissed or amused, but would not do more than write some paper. Insurance wasn’t based on points on license, so no big deal.
Last speeding ticket was 10+ years ago now.
eric, it’s more of the powerful and rich finding another way to rob the poor man. The poor is meat, the powerful will eat.
We’re about ready for a reset on all this stuff. I’m going to be interested how the military will reverse the Geneva convention of “rules of warfare” concerning bullets. You do understand soft, lead and copper bullets can’t be use in “war” since they don’t just wound but kill. Firefights among Geneva Convention forces leave lots of injured while firefights with cops and civilians leave dead.
Civilians won’t be using NATO ammo. They’ll be using all those good hunting rounds.
Right now the 6.5 PCR round is gaining fans like crazy and has even spawned a new 1,000 yd competition shooting. But the nads in using your standard AFR(America’s Favorite Rifle, the AR)is just lighting up with the .224 Valkyrie, a .22 caliber bullet weighing as much as 110 grains that can maintain supersonic speed beyond 1300 yards. It is something that will fit the AR 15 allowing a person to change from the varmint round of 5.56X45 to a .224 Valkyrie simply by changing the upper and the buffer spring, real cheap changovers.
Will we see the military get a bye “in this country” and not be constrained by the Geneva Convention? Who wants to bet the Geneva Convention rules will be outed for “in-country” riot control?
I have a bad feeling we’re going to find out if the general public or military trained dolts are the best shots.
We just watched the movie “Cloud Atlas” again. It’s a great movie with the theme of love and freedom being at the forefront. It’s a really great “freedom” movie everyone should see and will enjoy. It spans hundreds of years…..with the same theme. The ultra-rich and powerful won’t be interested in it since they’re almost to the last individual sociopaths who don’t even understand “love” nor want “freedom” to become the order of the day.
Snuggles,
What about pedestrian insurance?! How many pedestrians have walked out into a street and caused an accident? Once, in NY, I was walking on the sidewalk, and this fat woman came out of a subway station and walked right in front of me as I was in mid-step, and caused me to crash into her and knock her down!
And cooking insurance! Do you know how many apartment fires are started by people leaving stuff on the stove, or cooking with grease, etc.?! Innocent people get killed, and their property destroyed!!!!
And how about requiring insurance before one can purchase alcohol? You know, people have been known to get drunk and do crazy things!
I have advocated insuring the drivers rather than the cars but over the years I’ve found the cloverians won’t allow it because they don’t want people having small fleets of automobiles. They want new and shiny through the neighborhood and no more than one car per person.
8south, it sounds like they’re a regional phenomenon. My guess is that you live out in the backwoods somewhere where biking trails aren’t all that popular. Are there paved biking trails nearby? Are there bike shops that carry all the major brands and models? That should be your first clue as to why you don’t see them.
When you’re peddling your bike as hard as you can and you see a bunch of old geezers go flying by you while they’re all having a conversation, it eventually begins to wear on your back, legs, etc. and you eventually take one out for a test ride.
I live in retirement central. The retirement communities around here are nothing like your grandparent’s retirement communities. Everyone rides around in golf carts, or their recumbent mobile lazy boys. They play golf, tennis, party late into the night, and pop erectile dysfunction pills like they’re eating popcorn.
There’s are biking trails close-by called FM roads. There’s a bicycle shop or three 60 miles away but few to no biking trails there too.
I live in retirement general also. We call it the house….on the farm….as do my retired neighbors….in their house….on their farm. And I am an old geezer, I just choose to be a trucker so my last day won’t be one of people watching me die of cancer but one when my luck runs out from so many millions of miles that when something such as a steering tire blowing and I can’t keep it from going into that ravine where there won’t be an audience or attempted sterile environment or machines just to keep me breathing. It just seems like such a much better way to spend my time rather than waiting for the end cause when you are accomplishing things it’s different from “waiting”. I might even get lucky and find some young stuff that likes bald. One of my old friends does, but she’s the same age and lives 2,000 mile away.
Probably being a trucker I’d see a lot of trikes if people here road them.
A couple years ago I saw a pickup with empty bike racks in the back on the side of the interstate where I’d seen cyclists before. The headed S on a FM road and I pulled off and followed their direction(the only direction it went). I topped a hill and luckily saw another rig hauling the floor of a drilling rig that reached nearly from one fence to the other, probably 90′ wide. I managed to stop and pull into a lease and let him go by. I continued on down that road and didn’t see the cyclists. Having seen that pickup there several times before, I wasn’t surprised to never see it again. Retirement community…….bleehhhh!! Well, gotta go look for a horse. Maybe I’ll see Sam Houston’s ghost. He was one of few who could live and prosper with the local Comanche.
8south, what does FM stand for? At some point, if you live long enough; the government is going to tell you that you’re too old to drive. Those pesky DOT regulations keep getting updated and run more people out of their trucks and onto the dole.
The oldsters around here are just like anywhere else, but there are a lot of them who have been active there entire lives, or figure out that being active is better than a sedentary lifestyle.
About ten years ago, my girlfriend and I were hiking up to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite. About half way up we were passed by a couple that were obviously quite old yet it was also quite apparent that they were in way better shape than either one of us.
At the time, my girlfriend was a bookkeeper, and I was driving a truck. So we were both spending most of our time sitting on our butts. We were both walking a couple miles a day, but that hike proved to both of us that two miles a day wasn’t enough to get into, or stay in shape.
Now they have these desks that you can stand or sit at as if this is going to make much of a difference. There’s also a bunch of exercises one can do while they’re sitting, but I think one would have to do them all day long to make a slight dent in one’s health.
My uncle is about to turn 90. He volunteers to drive the elderly to doctors appointments and such- “The elderly”- most of whom are in their 60’s and 70’s….
But talk about wanting to decommission older working people and get them on the dole and into a sedentary lifestyle:
A local guy here whom I hired to do some backhoe work for me a few years ago, had just recovered from nearly severing his leg after having rolled his ‘hoe (The tractor, not his wife 🙂 )- Mine was the first job he was doing, after his 2 year recovery.
He was telling me how “they” were trying their damnedest to convince him to apply for disability, and retire (He was 69) but he didn’t want to be on the dole and just sit around doing nothing. He said that they were relentless, telling him how many “benefits” he could get, and that between that and not having to pay any taxes, he’d clear more sitting on his butt, than he could by working…….
A really sad commentary on the system, but very encouraging knowing that there are still some people around who can’t be bought-off.
Sadly, the guy died a year or two after going back to work, from an unrelated health issue.
Hi Nunz,
Kudos to that man; it’s an example I aspire to. Specifically as regards Socialist Insecurity. I have “contributed” all my working life – most which has been self-employed and so 15 percent right off the top of every dollar I earn. The total has to be in the vicinity of a quarter-mil by now. If I had that money today, I would not have to worry about money, ever again. I would continue to work until I can’t – but I would not have to.
Because I do not have that money, I do have to work. But I am determined to not apply for nor accept a cent of what I am “due” upon retirement because as I see it, that money is coming out of some other poor bastard’s hide. Mine was burned through a long time ago.
I always calculate my total tax burden using the ’employer contribution’ of social security since my productivity had to pay for that.
As to not taking it, I think that decision was already made for us Eric. Take it or not it won’t be worth squat when we get to that age if it is even still around.
Morning, Brent!
Even now, after “contributing” all these years, I’d happily sign a waiver of “benefits” in the future in return for not being forced to “contribute” going forward. A 15 percent percent reduction in my tax burden would pretty much pay for my utility bills all year long and take a load off. I could update EPautos – you know, something productive.
Instead, I “contribute” in the same way a mugging victim does, only the mugger is at least honest enough to just take my money without any silly pretenses.
I wish I could resurrect FDR long enough to kick the old socialist and Stalin snuggler down the stairs in his wheelchair. Force is the only language cretins such as he understood.
HE WAS A “GREAT” PRESIDENT! My history book said so! And I will get this GREAT retirement plan if I wait 10 more years. Slight discount if I do a 5 year wait. And he built this 5 sided building on your side of the river as a reminder.
Hi Toasty,
Yeah…! And I have a hot 23-year-old girlfriend rubbing my neck at this very moment 🙂
FDR was as loathsome as Lincoln. One could spend all day ticking off the atrocities and idiocies committed by this smarmy fraud.
His Stalin-snuggling especially annoys me. And the history half-truths taught kids in government schools.
The Germans invaded Poland and so started WW II!
No mention of the Soviets who partnered with the Reich to carve up Poland – and invaded and occupied the other half. No war declared on them.
So a fine war is fought to push back the Reich – in order to give what the Reich had occupied (or most of it) to the Soviet communists, a real improvement.
And FDR snuggled up to “Uncle Joe” all the while, cock-blocking any effort to get the Soviets out of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. What was the war fought for, again?
FDR made it a crime to own gold. A crime to farm contrary to the federal government’s decrees. He instituted Socialist InSecurity, which has turned old Americans into parasites upon the young and impoverished them both.
I would dig the bastard up and pee on his bones, if I could.
Amen to all of that, Eric!
It disgusts me every time I see the name Lincoln or Roosevelt on some building, school, street, etc.
“These are the men who ruined America, and who are responsible for the deaths and oppression of millions of innocents, including their own countrymen. Let’s celebrate them!”.
Hi Ya, Eric,
Brent illustrates the sheer evil genius of the Socialist Security system:
Take it, and it’s no different than taking welfare- for which we’ve also paid taxes; and welfare is exactly what the Supreme Court declared it to be.
We’re forced to pay; yet if we choose to collect and get “our money” back, all we’re doing is taking someone else’s money- the right to rob that someone else being granted to us by a higher-up crime-family boss who forced us to pay so someone could collect while we were working……
Yet if we don’t collect, no one else’s tax burden will be eased; immigrants- legal and illegal will still get “theirs”*yours; mine; ours…) as well as other entitlements….
Of course, not collecting is the philosophically integral and moral position- but ultimately, in the police state, it makes no real difference to anyone else- only our own consciences.
@Brent: SS will never go away, as long as there is a USA. No politician DARES to so much as criticize it, because that is the one thing which all statists, D or R, are universally united on- “Don’t touch ‘their’ money”. -It is the ONE single issue, which would mobilize mass revolt if even a mere hint of cessation were mentioned. They may water it down, and [most likely] print up more and more worthless money; raise retirement age, etc. but we will never see the end of that communism, because the people believe it is their money.
It’s funny how all of these people are so ignorant of even the most basic math, too!
For instance: My mother’s 1st husband: He was a low level mercenary (whimper fi) and then spent the next few decades working at minimum-wage jobs. I calculated what he might have paid-in in SS, using the highest rate near the end of his working life, applied to all of his wages from the past 40 years (1940’s-1980)-and then DOUBLED the amount, just be extra generous. It amounted to around $20K.
Out of that $20K, he got retirement benefits for c. 20 years (That alone wipes out the $20K). My mother got (and still gets) benefits off of “his account)- That’s >30 years of benefits….
His second wife, who also outlived him got benefits off of his account; His duaghter by that wife has gotten some kind of disability benefit on “his account” since she was a child (she’s c. 60 now), and my half sister collected Medicare and some kind of disability benefits, and now “retirement” benefits (she rarely worked, and when she did, it was off the books) on “his account”.
Add up all of those benefits going to all of those people, for decades- several MILLION dollars- all based on $20K (actually less) paid in by one man.
Talk about the new math!!!!!
But “Dad paid a tax for it” so it’s our money”. How many people have to pay in today to keep those benefits going, just to that one man’s family, because he paid a tax?
That’s the genius of that extortionist system- it makes people feel entitled to take someone else’s money, because they think of it as their own. How fiendishly clever and despicable!
Did I mention any entitlement? Nope. Nothing of the sort. The reason I say it doesn’t matter if we take it or not should it still exist is because the check from it won’t be worth anything. It might be like getting a nickel a month. maybe a few bucks. Nothing that would be anything like SS has been.
FICA is just a tax and I count both sides of it in my tax burden. I’ve lost well a lot to it. Enough to buy a house or two where I grew up. It’s gone.
SS is a pyramid scheme. It will go away. Eventually. Fedgov can forestall the day but the math will win eventually even if it means the collapse of fedgov. But fedgov has done practically nothing to forestall the wrath of mathematics. Instead fedgov sped it up by taking the money and turning it into war materials and then spreading those across south east asia and the middle east. Sped it up by extending SS to immigrants that never paid in or paid in extremely little.
Nunzio and Brent, you are both correct when it comes to social security being a Ponzi scheme and a “wealth transference system” from young to old. However, you are leaving one thing out, when it comes to receiving benefits through the social security system–compounding of interest. Give me my and my employer’s “share” of what was taken from me, compound interest added of,let’s say 2%, and I would be nearly a millionaire.
The city of Galveston Texas was the last municipality allowed to “opt out” of the social security system. The average Galveston city retiree receives approximately three times what the average social security recipient with the same wage receives. Now, public pensions are another ball of wax…
Regards,
Hi Anarchyst,
There is also the opportunity cost to consider. In my case, if I had the 15 percent of every dollar I earn that’s stolen from me to finance the retirement of some old coot I don’t even know (and so have no moral obligation enforceable at gunpoint to) I could afford to hire a full-time computer guy to do the updates this site badly needs done. And someone else would be get paid.
If I had all the SS money stolen from me over the past 20 years, I would have been able to buy a rental property, which would have generated income for me every month while the property itself appreciated in value over time. Eventually, I could have sold it and probably made enough to fund a large portion of my retirement needs, if not all of them.
Instead, I am – like everyone else – systematically impoverished in order to make me more dependent and less financially secure.
I would skull fuck FDR’s corpse if I could.
I haven’t so much left it out as haven’t found a way to bring it into this discussion.
But considering the fed keeps interest rates close to zero it’s not going to amount to much for the last decade.
What Brent said, Anarchyst.
It’s just a given that we are deprived of the use of the fruit of our labor- be it how that money could have enriched our lives now, or the interest it could have earned (If invested conservatively, over one’s working life, it would be worth MILLIONS with that compounded interest- and people could have a real retirement if they so chose- plus have the principal to leave to their heirs )- and so it is with ALL of the taxes extorted from us.
Imagine if the average person had the entire 50% of their wages which are stolen from them, and invested it all very conservatively- dear goodness, they’d be filthy rich!
Brent: “But considering the fed keeps interest rates close to zero it’s not going to amount to much for the last decade.”
Yes, that’s certainly true now- that, plus the absurdity of the stock market in recent years- but imagine the recent past- when any yutz could invest in a conservative growth mutual fund and pretty much be guaranteed a 10% yearly return.
Or, if one were to take that money and invest it in their own business- or in hard assets that would appreciate- etc. ……
Brent: “Did I mention any entitlement?”.
What do you mean?
Awhile back there was a case in Texas where teen-age fast-food restaurant workers refused to serve certain “law enforcement” personnel. The news media jumped all over the fast-food workers, criticizing and lambasting them for not showing “respect” to these porkers.
Now, for the rest of the story…
It turns out that the porkers who were refused service were constantly harassing these fast-food workers, writing them tickets for “equipment violations” and for other harassment reasons, and stopping them on false pretexts, “just because they could”.
A ticket issued to a young fast-food worker could amount to a whole week’s pay. Of course, the porkers didn’t care. They quite often laughed about rousting these young kids.
These fast-food workers fought back the only way they could…
They did lose their jobs, but did develop a healthy wariness for porkers…
The kids should have pissed in their food instead, and then served it to them with a big smile.
Try living in Michigan with NO-FAULT mandatory insurance. Back in ’77 when I got my license on my 16th B-day, it was $110/month for PL/PD in the “insurance pool” for an old ’72 Pontiac Grandville (oh yea) bought for $200. Oh, to register at the Sec Of State, you have to have proof of insurance and the complete policy info is printed on the vehicle registration. On the RD-108 form, all insurance info is loaded in and the folks in Lansing ran around the state all year long verifying with the insurance agents that coverage is active.
If pulled over, both vehicle registration and insurance card have to match or “oops”.
That and MI crazy unlimited medical coverage on the auto policy that they still cannot fix. They tried last year and still over 40years of politics, risky drivers play the coverage game (get insurance the day before and drop the policy the next day).
Hi Toasty,
Yup. And now the same is under way with health insurance. Everyone will pay through the nose for shitty coverage (tooth-pulling refusal to pay on a claim but guaranteed increases in premium costs even if you never file a claim) so that a mafia can roll in our dough.
Solution – or rather, my fantasy?
A really big ditch and lots of kerosene… plus one Zippo lighter.
Eric,
BINGO! When the Dems pushed O-Care “got to sign the bill to see what is in it”, I knew what it was and called it Medical No-Fault living thru it when a teenager for auto ins. My single mother said to all us kids: if you want a car, you pay for it and get your own insurance. Tough but wise in the long haul. Fortunately I worked for an auto wholesaler whose the owner brother was an insurance agent and sister was a sheriff in the “helpful” dept. O-Care will turn into the connection department as the No-Fault Med Ins is forced down our throats. I am in the same boat you are, no “company” coverage (AKA employer insurance pool). At least the mandatory coverage got “changed”. OPTION 1: Pay an Ins Premium equal to a large mortgage or OPTION 2: Pay zero and pray.
Please note, I will not say HEALTHCARE. It is neither………
Hi Toasty,
Yup!
Obamacare is in fact a calculated impoverishment plan specifically targeting the self-employed, who are at much greater liberty (for now) than people stuck in corporate wage slavery. The idea is to force everyone into corporate wage slavery because that means the end of whatever liberty we still enjoy.
And I don’t mean not having to shave in the morning and drive to the cube farm. I mean – as in my case – being at liberty to openly speak my mind without fear of losing my job and thus, being able to feed myself. I do not have to “transition” into a compliant/cringing (lightly bearded) Snowflake, wearing the approved suit and saying and doing only the approved things.
The government/powers-the-be cannot abide this.
So, make it a requirement that the self-employed buy health insurance – that is, send the insurance mafia a huge payment which many self-employed people cannot afford to make, even if they wanted to – and threaten them with abusive fines/taxes for failing to do so.
Give them the “option” of poverty . . . or corporate employment and the loss of any independence they formerly enjoyed.
Eff them. Let them come get me. I will, if it comes to that, throw a bucket of gasoline on the first son of a bitch who comes to my door demanding payment for “shared responsibility”…
Eric,
I got booted from the OEM/Supplier Animal Cubie Farm in May as I fought with the OEM on TRUTH of their directed design that is going down road right now. It is minor issue but other OEMs are now benchmarking and copying the bad design. You mentioned the word TRUTH>. You probably tested the model and if you did it right, the function would fall. Doesn’t matter, SHIP IT! Warranty is stacking up when I got booted. The OEM engineers ignore us veteran engineers and we see the “Herding of Cats” at the tech centres. Got to watch the “radio” issue right in our backyard before it was announced the capability to “control” the vehicle.
So I am trying to figure out what is next as I got booted out and all my complete interior automotive experience and knowledge out the window. My late teens and early 20’s as a wholesaler, got to see what really happens to that “new” car. Un-INSURED in OH>>>>
Hi Toasty,
Your story is familiar to me; I know several people similarly situated. I have been fortunate enough to have avoided being a slave of the corporate world since the ’90s – and am now much too feral to ever return to a cage. It would mean certain death.
My fury on the Obamacare thing is directed especially at Republicans – who deserve full credit for it. The Chimp, Romney, McCain, Ryan…and most of all, Roberts. They gave us Obamacare. Not Obama.
Yes, the DC Corporation R&D center worked together since they get paid by the same employer. They have a very fancy building with lots of buildings around it to support the center to a point it spreads all over. The REPB researched it and the DEMS developed it. Sight problem before Job1 was launched, no one DV or PV it to make sure it is workable. They heard about this “zero prototype” concept that is running around using the computer models that says “it works!”. Thus the development side said “you got to read it to see what is in it”.
Since DC Corp is a LLC, the R&D folks are off the hook.
Not only that, the “Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association”, the disburser of the funds for unlimited medical costs is sitting on approximately 480 BILLION dollars and is doing nothing with the money. An assessment is levied on each vehicle in Michigan to the tune of approximately $179.00 per year. This is on top of the cost of “insurance”.
Michigan has the highest auto insurance costs in the USA…
Anarchist,
I now live in OH which handles “proof of insurance” differently than MI but it is still a mess here with non-insured and low-insured drivers on the road just like MI. Having to pay for “Un-Insured Other Driver Coverage” and “Low Other Driver Insured Coverage” are additional premiums needed to cover for these situation. 2 separate ADDED rates just to protect yourself. Good luck if you don’t have this.
Yes, the MI Unlimited Med on Auto Ins is a Hugh scam. Glad you reminded us the $480B still in a vault in Lansing.
I find it hard to believe that some government worker is going to run around making sure insurance is up to date. They’ve already got their money. It’s the insurance companies that would notify the DMV to let them know that the payments have stopped. That’s the way it was when I was growing up.
Shnarkle,
Ohio just “ask” if you have insurance when registering or renewal and you sign on the form to say “yes”. No proof or insurance policy info given. The state BMV does random check via mail notification and if you don’t have proof for the time in question, BAM!!, felony!!
If you’re operating an automobile and have an roadside interaction with a cop in Illinois they’ll want to see the insurance card.
On one hand, I disagree with you. If a kid wants something bad enough, they will work for it to get it. Perhaps get their face off twitter, you-tube and other ‘social media’ and vid games, playing & hanging with their friends, or chasing a girl and work more than part time, then go play. I worked since I was 15, full time through high school. Senior year, my classes were over at 11am (credits done) from there I went (walked 45 min -hr) to work till 11pm. By time I graduated at 17, I had enough money saved to purchase a brand new Pontiac Ventura. That’s with minimum wage being $1.15.
Yes prices have gone up since, but entry job wages are still good enough and relative to yesteryear, as far as purchase price goes. Paid for my own insurance too.
If you want something bad enough ( wheels) work for it! And get it.
On the other hand, most auto’s today are putzes. Most crossovers all look alike no matter what ‘brand’,
Not many choices for a teen or young adult except a ‘putz’. Who wants to own and drive a putz that quits when stopped/braked, has features you don’t want-lane assist, auto braking, 1,000 cameras, movie playing vid equip & sirus, Kids want a cool car, with a great audio system so they have some freedom.
Oops, forgot. Freedom is not something encouraged these days (on purpose).
Hi Chris,
There are a couple of hairs in your soup, so to speak…
First, this working full-time business while still in high school. That is improbable as well as probably illegal today. For the most part, kids are in school full time and thus full-time employment is a non-starter. Besides which, it ought not to be necessary to have to work full-time to be able to afford to own a beater car and drive it as a high school kid. I can attest it wasn’t necessary when I was a high school kid in the ’80s; not for myself or any of my friends. And we all had cars at 16-17. Not great cars – but they were ours. And none of us had to work full-time to support them.
I worked at a full-time job during my last two years of high school without difficulty. If one wants something bad enough, they will find a (legal) way to get it…
Hi Anarchyst,
Yes, true – but kind of beside the point. Which is that absurd and artificial costs are making it harder and harder for kids to own – and come to love – cars and driving. That was the point of the article!
Well, back when I was in HS, one had to have a certain amount of credits to graduate. I fulfilled all of mine and in 12th grade, had all my classes in the am and was done for the day by 11am.
I don’t believe it is illegal to work a full time job while in high school-16 is the age limit to start working now. if you are 16- you can. Even if you are out of school at 2 you can still work a full time job, or part time- and as many other jobs you want , mowing lawns, odd handyman work etc whatever you can find, instead of chasing girls and wasting life on social media.
Case in point, the kid in HS who mowed our lawn (3/4 acre) had a great work ethic. On time, job well done so much so we gave him 10$ more per cut (45). He did what ever jobs he could find, even collecting scrap from a/c installers and selling it and doing grunt work for them. By time he graduated, he had bought his own new BIG truck on his own. His work ethic was impressive to say the least. Sadly, too many kids these days want it handed to them and not work for what they want. He just joined the Navy and is training to become a SEAL.
I agree it’s still possible. It is also possible to become an NFL Quarterback… or a SEAL.
You make my point for me. Yes, an exceptional kid who is willing to assume a full-time job in addition to being a full-time student can afford $3k a year for a car and all the rest of it. In the past, it wasn’t necessary to have a full-time job to be able to afford to own and drive a car.
One major reason being the corrective of being able to “get away” without buying insurance at all. The computerized Nexus of Everything didn’t exist then. So the dicks didn’t know. No accidents, no worries.
Not anymore.
You will be crucified – not for having an accident but for not having insurance.
It is the difference between holding people responsible for the harms they have caused and tyranny – abusing people who’ve harmed absolutely no one.
Because some Clover is worried they “might.”
In Tennessee it is illegal for any individual below the age of 18 to work more than 20 hours a week. Take that 20 hours a week then multiply that to the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour and you get $133.95 after taxes. The total of the weekly wage comes to $575.98 (4.3 monthly average). Subtract the average $250.00 and that leaves you with an average 325.98 to make a car payment and gas. You can see why a teen now refuses to purchase a car. The above doesn’t include registration (some states levy an ad valorem tax based on the value of the car). Some states levy a personal property tax in addition to the ad valorem tax. For a teen to have a car in these times, Eric is correct. The teen would need a full time job and not at minimum wage just to have money for dates and entertainment.
Thanks, NoneYa!
Good to have you and others here covering my six!
Feel sorry for kids growing up today. We had no idea we were the last generation (1980’s kids, I’m 44 now) with relative freedom. Freedom to be around the neighborhood and woods without adults. Bikes without helmets, not scheduled every second of the day. An actual summer including all of August off from school.
My nephews have more material things (like their screens and video games) then we did, but I think overall my brothers and I had a better childhood in that re-guard (we did have 8 bit Nintendo and Atari, but way fewer hours of it). They are all hyper because they don’t have any real free unscheduled time.
Hi Rich,
Amen, ditto. The other day, I had a convo along these lines with my protege, who is 16 and just got his license (he can drive Sexual Chocolate – his VW – now!) I told him tales of the ’80s and ’90s, of being able to just hang out with friends, unsupervised and unscripted; about being able to drive as a fully-invested adult at 16 – no restrictions at all. He cannot drive with other teens in his car until he is 17 or 18. No seat belt laws. Insurance that was affordable and if not, you could just skip it and “get away” with it.
I feel terrible for today’s kids.
Watched Terminator II the other day. Came out in the early 90s. Young John Connor rides his dirt bike over to the mall to meet all his friends at the arcade. Without a helmet.
You can bet that the police officer stationed at the school (to “keep them safe”) is going to wander through the parking lot running license plates when the kids are in class.
They have plenty of time, in fact lots of time to be doing stuff like that.
They have the Orwellian moniker of “resource officer” and we should have never allowed this to get traction.
Kids need to be told to never, ever get near this person, don’t talk to them, walk down another hallway if necessary to stay away from them. They are NOT your friend and cause nothing but trouble.
I’ve always asked this simple question to which there is never an answer: Why is it so important to have someone with powers of arrest in a school? Onsite, instantly available powers of arrest are that necessary?
I’ve always asked this simple question to which there is never an answer: Why is it so important to have someone with powers of arrest in a school? Onsite, instantly available powers of arrest are that necessary?
the answer in one word: INTEGRATION.
Exactly. Their job is to arrest people and collect evidence to be used in a trial later. Why would you want one in your kid’s school, where they’re going to get bored and look for crimes being committed.
The odd thing is that most teens aren’t really driving that much anyway. We’d drive to school, or to the mall, or to our friend’s house. On Sunday we’d chauffeur the family to church and dinner. Maybe once every few months we’d go to a concert in Pittsburgh. And for sure the cost of fuel kept us pretty close to home anyway. It was pretty rare for any of us to drive on the freeways, at least without a parent along. Good way to gain some experience too.
Also it used to be that my sister was cheaper to insure than I was. Then there was a court case that said that was discrimination. So instead of lowering boys’ vig down to match the YLs’ they just raised up the girls’ too. So even when they lose, they win.
I thought you had a libertarian perspective? The free-ish market has priced auto insurance for the young at a certain amount. I thought a libertarian would accept that. It does not seem to me that with auto insurance the young are subsidizing the old, as is the case with pensions, health insurance, social security, and other forms of insurance. I think a libertarian criticism would be: fine charge the youth a huge amount for auto insurance, but price their other insurance purchases based on their reduced costs due to age. You could argue that health insurance for the young should be really cheap maybe even free.
Manufacturers and insurers might be able to solve the problem if permitted. For example, special insurance that restricts youth drivers could be synchronized with special cars that enforce the free market insurance contract. Or youth could be restricted to vehicles that do less damage, perhaps like the new 3 wheelers like Elio and Vanderhall, except maybe the special lightweight vehicles could have 4 wheels. In the past, if you were young and wanted to drive stupid, a car like the MG midget kind of protected everyone except the foolhardy driver and the single naive passenger.
A bit off topic, I would also point out that insurance limits for auto liability are very small in comparison to potential damage. The minimum liability for an automobile should be in the millions not the thousands. To placate libertarians that claim they should not be required to have insurance because they are personally responsible, in olden times, in place of insurance the driver could post bond equal to the insurance minimum limit. In some states, I believe it is still possible although never done in practice.
As a final note, why don’t you start an insurer if you really think you are right. Read this boring but fascinating book: The Farmer from Merna: A Biography of George J. Mecherle and a History of the State Farm Insurance Companies of Bloomington, Illinois
The insurance market is horribly distorted by mandates. One of the alternatives we have with most products is that we simply don’t buy them, so producers have to create enough of a value proposition to entice people to buy their stuff at all. We no longer have that with car insurance, so prices go up.
Insurance isn’t really part of the free market, you’re forced to buy it from one company or another, or risk being heavily fined and having your driver’s license revoked. They hold all the cards, and for a long time now they’re just been busting peoples balls. There’s a negligible difference between rates for adults from company to company unless they’re giving you some hefty discount for being a long-time customer.
Let them charge whatever the hell they want as long as it’s not mandatory. The point here is you can’t reasonably expect a kid to give a shit about driving anymore when they’ve made it ludicrously expensive considering they haven’t done anyone any harm to deserve to have their rates so jacked up from the start. And more likely than not, the gov is counting on hurdles like these to condition people to willingly forgo the right to operate any vehicle at all.
I think I’ll move to DC and lobby for mandatory daily web visits to EPautos.com as an important driver safety measure. After enough politicians’ pockets are lined, law will dictate that each American should now pay $20 to take a 10-hour de-clovering test online and have this new certification replace their auto insurance altogether, because libertarianism?
Amen, Moose!
I wonder whether George would object to being required by law to help finance EPautos?
Oh no see we wouldn’t allow objections lol you have to pay for the certification because yo..we said so. You can visit EPautos from the link on facebook or the link on twitter, but you’re gonna have to visit it, this is a free country remember
That’s right Moose. If people can’t FREELY move about, it is much easier for the corporations and governments (now one and the same all under control of the bankers) to implement their agendas of enslaving the population. No movement no freedom to take part in protests against the totalitarian state these aliens want to impose on the human race. No freedom for you to just up and go when and where you want. Governments in the “free” world loath that, you know. And now they are implementing laws to remove that freedom. And since when do any constitutions ever mention the concept of “safety”?
This was for George.
RE to a previous EP article, my college tuition in 1977 was $2200, the same university is now charging $35,000 for one year. I went to college solely to get out of Vietnam war. In that I was highly successful, in that I served in Johnson’s war to enrich the corporations he and stock in. Nor did I kill people who had done no harm to me.
You read it right, twenty two hundred dollars. And car insurance of $200 per year. I even worked almost full time, paid taxes to support Johnson’s war, and managed to have money in the bank. All without government support. Try that in 2018.
Hi George,
Others beat me to this, but to reiterate: If insurance were not mandatory, you would get no argument from me. But it is a government-enforced “must buy” (like health insurance) which jacks up the cost for everyone to obnoxious, unsupportable levels. If people could say “no” to the insurance mafia, the mafia would have to lower its prices to levels the market could bear – or go out of business.
No one has a right to customers – or to profit by force.
Take away force and the mafia could no longer charge a teen/young driver who had never incurred a loss $3k annually; the teen could just say no.
What do you suppose would happen to the cost of laptops if the government decreed everyone had to buy one – and had to buy one that met certain specifications? We’d all be paying $3,000 for shitty laptops and poor (insolent) service.
You write:
“The minimum liability for an automobile should be in the millions not the thousands.”
This is a good example of presumptive guilt and a priori (before the fact) punishment. Your argument amounts to: Someone might or could incur a huge loss; therefore, he must be required to pre-pay for damages he hasn’t caused.
Using your own logic, people also ought to be forced to buy chainsaw insurance. And of course, gun insurance. This is in fact exactly what authoritarian collectivist now advocate. Where does it stop? It stops nowhere, because might cause harm can be said of any human action. It is an invitation to and justification for tyranny – look around at what has become of the country on exactly the basis of this sort of reasoning.
Libertarians support the idea that individuals are responsible for themselves; that they not be responsible for others – or what others “might” do (or even what others have done). As the writer William Burroughs once said about the same idea: “After a mass shooting, they always go after the people who didn’t do it.” Exactly so.
If Kid A (or adult A) is a reckless/dangerous driver – as established by having caused harm – hold that person responsible for the harm caused. Don’t use it as na excuse to harm others who’ve not harmed anyone.
Finally, you write:
“Why don’t you start an insurer if you really think you are right.”
It is not necessary to start an insurance company to demonstrate that I am morally right. Insurance at gunpoint for harms not caused is theft euphemized, nothing less.
Note that the government-backed insurance mafias are among the most profitable “businesses” going.
“If Kid A (or adult A) is a reckless/dangerous driver – as established by having caused harm – hold that person responsible for the harm caused. ”
What does that mean? If they can’t pay do you put them in debtors prison? What is the exact sequence of events if someone causes $50,000 of bodily injury and $20,000 of property damage, and has no ability to pay? What if the person already has $50,000 of student debt and no assets other than the car that was totaled and earns an English majors increment above minimum wage.
Taking personal responsibility means not driving unless you have the ability to pay for a possible accident. How do you propose to do that?
Back in olden days, you had a choice of buying insurance or posting a bond for the amount of insurance. So there was a choice about accepting individual responsibility in lieu of insurance. But these days I doubt most people would be able to post $70,000 in the state of VA. Posting $70k is just the VA insurance minimums, you would have to pay your own legal fees.
Does the amount of insurance you quote include collision? Collison might be optional.
You can’t really compare a libertarian world against the current world, because the fundamental structures underlying the market would be different. I would imagine, for example, that people would insure themselves against uninsured drivers to protect themselves against these outcomes, and strict liability in court for damages would encourage people to buy insurance so that they are indeed not forced to pay damages they can’t afford (this could look like wage garnishment, for example).
There are ways of protecting against these situations even in a free market model, but we can’t do a “all other things equal” kinds of comparisons since things would work in different ways without mandates.
Maybe a good solution is to still require everyone to have insurance, but, new drivers and everyone else with no claims only has to pay the lowest premium that the insurance company offers, … and if the driver has no claims they keep paying the lowest rate, but if the driver has a big claim then and only then are their rates jacked up for as many years as it takes to pay back that claim.
Hi Crazy,
I attack the premise of mandatory insurance as such. Whether car or health or otherwise. It is nothing less than theft euphemized – a kind of proactive punishment for harms not caused.
How about a refund of all the money I’ve been forced to hand over to the mafia the past 25 years for harms I have not caused?
It’s at least $25,000 by my reckoning… and I sure could use it.
I could get EPautos updated. Hell, I could get my cats up to date at the vet.
And I could buy myself a goddamn steak for once.
Instead, I am mulcted for the benefit of some greasy shyster in a silk suit at the Geico HQ.
Sorry this reply is 34 days after article date. Not sure you’ll be able to read it.
Yeah, I totally understand what you’re saying, but driving a car is a logistical problem since we live in a money society. Who’s going to pay if you cause some damage/injury and you can’t pay it? It seems to me that if you don’t want to buy insurance then you should have to post a bond. Maybe half of the insurance premium could be transferred to a savings account, and when it adds up to the bond amount, then you don’t have to buy insurance anymore.
Just by driving a car, you’re creating the high potential for causing high damage, sooooo, how else can we deal with this problem in a money society? That’s the only reason I think insurance is ok to mandate in this case.
As things are now, we already are forced to buy uninsured driver’s coverage, which I think is a crime because there’s not supposed to be ANY uninsured drivers on the roads to begin with, so I think the DMV and insurance co’s and law enforcement are not doing their job, because they could easily make sure everyone has insurance. So if they did their job, then we wouldn’t have to buy that coverage so our premiums would be less.
“so I think the DMV and insurance co’s and law enforcement are not doing their job”
That’s just it. The law protecting us is an illusion. The government doesn’t actually do anything to protect us. It’s laws are written such that it has no obligation and no liability if they fail to do so. So all these laws end up doing is being a weapon government can use against people while offering no real protection.
Law or no law we’re on our own. We still ultimately rely on everyone else being as responsible as ourselves. The law doesn’t do anything for us, it just becomes another way to pick our pockets.
Hi Harry,
Again, your argument amounts to pre-crime punishment. That I must indemnify because I might cause harm. Put more finely – that I must be harmed (money stolen from me) because of harms I haven’t caused.
Ok, can you explain why – if I must buy car insurance because I might harm someone with my car – everyone who owns a gun (and wishes to carry off their property) should not also be forced to buy gun insurance? How about insurance for dog owners? People who buy hot coffee? (After all, I might throw the searing liquid in someone’s face.)
Do you see?
Yo write: “Just by driving a car, you’re creating the high potential for causing high damage . . .”
Really? I haven’t so much as scuffed a fender in decades.The car companies would never issue me a brand-new (and often very high-powered) car if I showed any signs of being dangerous.
Where’s my refund for decades of no-harm-caused?
At what point does a record of no harm caused finally convince you that I am not someone you need to worry about?
lol ok, i read everyones’ comments. I truly appreciate everyones’ commitment to freedom, I like that too, I’m on board. BUT, the whole car insurance thing is a logistical problem SINCE we live in a money society. If society didn’t use money, and instead everyone just helped out and made things better, then your concept makes sense. BUT we live in a money society, sooooo, what do we do when a drunk driver wrecks your car and injures you, and neither of you can afford to pay the bills? Even if you send the perp to jail, the bills still aren’t paid. Cars are a special situation, they’re not like guns or hot coffee etc, because guns/etc are very improbable to have an accident with, whereas cars… slippery roads… bad brakes… etc… it’s so probable for a high % of drivers to have an accident… basically the car insurance mandate is just trying to be proactive by being prepared for the inevitable. YOU commenters (and myself) are safe drivers, but not everyone is like us. I know… you’re saying one can buy insurance for themself if they want it… but what about the poor people that can’t really afford the insurance, then had an accident, and they go to jail, but they have kids at home, now they won’t be able to take care of their kids/etc. IDK.
more thoughts… so you’re saying I can buy my own insurance, if I wan to, to protect myself from all the bad drivers that cause all the damage but THEY don’t have to buy insurance. So the perps don’t pay anything, and the victims pay everything. That doesn’t seem fair. BTW, in my mind, this car insurance thing is the ONLY situation that doesn’t fall under the “total freedom” umbrella. Basically cars are a WMD and so necessitate an intervention in total freedom/anarchy.
Hi Harry,
Oy.
First off, laws mandating insurance do not prevent irresponsible people from driving without out in anymore than “gun control” prevents evil people from getting and using guns to murder people. All such laws do is make life more onerous and expensive for the people who are not the problem. As with health insurance, I (and most others) would probably buy it without being forced, if the price were reasonable and based on our extremely low risk profile. But it’s not reasonable, because it’s mandatory – which allows the insurance mafia to gouge everyone, regardless of their risk profile.
Second, your argument (and I’ve explained this multiple times) amounts to preventive punishment. You demand I buy insurance – a financial harm imposed on me – even though I have not harmed you or anyone else and even if I never do harm you or anyone else, the money extorted is not refunded. How is this right or even reasonable?
I’ve also pointed out that using your argument, why not force gun owners to carry insurance? And owners of dogs and cats, too? Anything that might cause harm. The principle is exactly the same and it is because people such as yourself buy into this idea that we live in a Nanny-Police state.
Harry, now you made me put on my mud boots so I could wade through your shit.
Back before mandatory insurance, “almost” everyone had at least liability because it was cheap.
Even black people who were treated fairly shabbily had insurance if they had a car. The problem in Texas was Mexicans did hold to no damn insurance and since the only penalties for not having insurance were civil one, anyone they wrecked with were SOL, the very reason nearly everyone paid the extra dollar or two for uninsured motorist.
I paid insurance because I had things to lose in a suit and out of a sense of morality.
Of course there’s so little morality left in this country now I realize even mentioning sounds like a joke…..and it verily was the biggest joke in the world when the Clintons went all apeshit over “crime”…..now that’s irony of the highest order.
But anyway, Mexicans in Tx. almost never had insurance so everyone else bought uninsured motorist for a dollar or two.
Now that insurance is mandatory I pay $21 for uninsured motorist on my old shit pickup.
Recently a friend ran into a carload of illegals(Mexicans) because it was pitch black and they had no lights on the back of their car(We don’t need no stinkin lights.)
The cops just wrote it up and the Mexicans continued on their way because they had no insurance nor DL. My friend’s car was totaled but she had uninsured motorist so the insurance company paid her for her car that they deemed worth nearly nothing but served her well.
Are you getting the picture now? The mandatory insurance is a scam to fleece people who would normally buy insurance anyway. In a free market there would be competition as there used to be. There isn’t a free market for anything now, the very thing libertarians and anarchists such as myself oppose in every way.
Your ass-kissing bankers(insurance companies)doesn’t fly on this site nor many others. Or maybe you’re an insurance agent and this mandatory shit is making you rich. It’s still not moral and it shouldn’t be legal. You might want to remember that next time you vote for Fric or Frac, both of whom force this shit down our collective throats.
They would do the same thing they do to cover the possibility they might be burglarized, their house might burn down, etc.
That is, if sufficiently concerned they would carry their own insurance to cover accidental or unexpected loss.
Harry,
The issue is whether a given individual has caused an actual harm – not whether you worry “someone” might. There is no “special case” and rights are not a function of statistics, nor punishment (morally speaking) a question of collectives/group guilt.
If someone does cause harm, then he – and only he – should be held fully accountable. You worry about money? That the offender can’t pay? I agree with Nunzio. Put him to work – as an indentured servant, if need be – for a period of time that is appropriate to compensate for the damages done.
This is moral – and entirely feasible.
Instead, you advocate the immoral – enslaving people (by stealing their money) who’ve not caused any harm to anyone, in order to “cover” the harms you worry they might cause.
This is vicious all by itself but made even more so because the money stolen is taken for the gain of a hugely profitable mafia.
There’s no “LOL” and “sooo” about it.
Harry say:
“so you’re saying I can buy my own insurance, if I wan to, to protect myself from all the bad drivers that cause all the damage but THEY don’t have to buy insurance. So the perps don’t pay anything, and the victims pay everything.”
But what you’re advocating is that EVERYONE be forced to purchase insurance, whether they are good drivers or bad drivers, or whether or not they actually ever cause any harm or not.
We do not advocate that those who cause harm be relieved of any responsibility; quite the contrary- we believe that those who actually cause harm should be held fully liable for all damage to life and property which they cause.
Forcing everyone to purchase insurance, and even making it a punishable “crime” to drive without such insurance is WORSE than merely allowing people to purchase insurance to cover damages that others may cause, because it forces everyone to pay- good, bad, innocent or guilty.
Holding people responsible for the actual consequences of their actions is the only fair and equitable scenario- and as I and others have already said, if insurance were not mandatory, it would be MUCH cheaper, both for liabilities which you may incur, and for damage caused by others from whom you may have a hard time collecting from. New Hampshire being a perfect example of that economic fact.
Hey Harry, when one considers the likelihood of having an accident for most is going to be close to nil, it makes more sense to simply point out to those who are going to be driving that regardless of who is at fault, you will be paying for your own damages. If there were no insurance, or automobile loans, the price of cars would come down considerably, and repairs would be affordable as well.
Harry, what you say is true about MANY of our daily endeavors- that we have the potential to cuase harm/damage just by engaging in them. Does that mean that we should have to carry insurance for everything we do in which the potential exists to cause harm/damage, and be punished for not carrying insurance, or prevented from engaging in that activity?
The way it is, people like myself and Eric and many, many others, who have never caused a cent worth of damage to any other person in decades of driving, have been made to pay, over the years, via insurance premiums, as much money as if we had done serious harm to others and their property.
How is that equitable or fair?
The way it should be, is that people should be held responsible for liabilities which they actually create. If they have no way to pay for the damages they cause, then their possessions (ibcluding their home) are used to satisfy their liability- and if they do not have sufficient possessions with which to cover their liabilities, then their labor is used- in the form of them becoming an indentured servant.
In such a world, where one is fully responsible for their actions, men would behave much more responsibly; choose to carry insurance voluntarily (and that insurance would be MUCH cheaper, not being mandated by law- because everyone would have the option of just saying no if the premiums were more than the market could bear); and people would actually THINK about their conduct. “Hmmm, I’m half-soused and my tires are bald and it’s raining. Do I really want to chance driving right now, and possibly end up losing everything i own and or essentially becoming a slave for the next few decades?”.
Instead, the system of mandated insurance we now have, relieves the guilty of much of their responsibility, while imposing that liability on the majority of innocents- not only making innocent people pay financially for harm they have never caused, but even penalizing them; preventing them from driving; and even imprisoning them, just for failure to comply with such an unjust mandate- while the person who has truly caused harm, often suffers no such fate.
This is a perfect example of what happens when the free market, and free society are perverted. The people who balk at the idea of making a slave of someone who causes harm but who can not recompense the person he has harmed, for some reason, do not balk at the idea of making us all slaves, though we have harmed no one.
“Maybe a good solution is to still require everyone to have…”
Harry, don’t fall for the fallacy that you or other “good people” can come up with a better mandate than the state already has. As an opponent of central planning, I have no obligation to concoct a central plan of my own. When a statist asks me, “Well, smarty pants, then what would YOU do?” I tell them, “I would shut up and mind my own business.”
Insurance is an important good in an unhampered market economy, one that each individual should be free to buy with his own money or leave on the shelf.
It’s called living in a free country vs. a socialist police state.
Some of us value Liberty more than financial or physical safety.
If you are afraid of injury buy insurance to protect you but do not force thereat of us to buy any product we do not want.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the back up!
It depresses me to almost unrecoverable catalepsy that so many Americans are so reflexively coercive collectivist. This mandatory insurance business is an obvious example.
Force people to buy “coverage” – and not only that, but “coverage” which presumes they will damage on the basis of collective criteria and which also forces them to pay for damages caused by other people.
Gotta side with you on this. I grew up on Illinois. Started driving in 1976. First car was $300 Chevy wagon. Wrecked it and wrenched it. Drove muscle cars. Always being pulled over for loud exhaust or rear end jacked up too high. Drank and drove. Smoked and drove. I was FREE!!
Lucky I didn’t kill anyone or myself. Loathed the state. Don’t tell me what to do!
Now, at 59, I have no license (since 2006). Haven’t owned a vehicle for 2 years or drove for 3. Got no DL tickets, but beat them on court (I know the law). I commute by bike every day and ride 8k – 12k per year. I see drivers from a different perspective now. Distracted, aggressive, intolerant…. Most vehicles selling in excess of $30k. A fender bender costs over 1k.
Libertarianism works well when you’re the only person in a society where everyone is just like you, but let a swarm of teens driving rust buckets put a $40k SUV in danger of a nick and watch people clamor for curtailing a teen’s liberty. My right to use the road with my bike does not end despite people passing too close, cursing, throwing things, getting out at lights wanting to fight, or other intolerant nonsense (I’ve been in 2 accidents with distracted drivers).
I took risks and prevailed. I fault no one who drives without a license or insurance and does so carefully. I do, however, hold them responsible for any damages. I insure my bike because I can’t trust others will cover my damages. I insured my vehicles because it was responsible and cheaper than paying for a 30k vehicle. I will be getting a DL soon because I may need to drive someone else’s vehicle and I don’t want to risk having it impounded or not covered because I was not licensed.
Do I feel oppressed? No. I still feel the weight of the state pressing down, but I’m not the only one out there and I’ve played the cost-benefit game of being a rebellious scofflaw. Yeah, there’s too much regulation and exploitation by bottom feeding bureaucrats, but let’s not over romanticize the market and some unattainable libertarian Utopia where options and opportunity abound because, rugged individuslinism and entrepreneurialism.
The days of drinking a 6pk while leaving a blue cloud of burnt oil to choke kids and mosquitoes and blaring Van Halen are fun to reminisce over, but not a way to responsibility exercise freedom.
Hi Randall,
The solution to the problems you describe is not more government – more mandates, laws and regulations. Unless you want to live in a stifling prison for crimes for “crimes” you haven’t committed.
Why do cars cost the absurd sums you mention? It is not because of the free market. Why are people addled/distracted/inept behind the wheel? It is not because of a lack of mandates and regulations.
If – just to begin, and just with this one small corner of our world – it were possible to build and sell and buy and legally drive simple, inexpensive cars (very light, extremely fuel-efficient; no got-damned air bags or other saaaaaaaaaaaaafety crap; a clean-burning but simple and DIY-serviceable TBI engine, etc.) many people would do so. This would present an alternative to the overpriced, overteched stuff people are compelled to buy now. It would put pressure on other car makers to offer lower-priced vehicles.
If people could say no to overpriced insurance, the cost of insurance would go down – for everyone.
So, no – I don;t accept your argument because it’s wrong – and because I do not wish to live in an American version of East Germany.
eric, this all sounds right, but if you go into your favorite restaurant and discover that they’ve suddenly doubled or tripled their prices, would you still eat there, or would you go to the competition? Perhaps the competition is farther away, and they don’t have the great view your favorite restaurant has. These are things we need to prioritize and decide whether or not it’s worth it to pay these high prices. Don’t they call it “voting with your feet”?
You can buy the economical better cars, but you have to vote with your feet. No one is preventing you from buying the better cars. Your priorities don’t allow you to buy them. You live in a country that has been doing this nonsense practically from its inception. The legal system refers to this as “constructive knowledge” which is like saying you knew this was the deal when you decided to live here.
You may not wish to live in an American version of east Germany, but the fact is that is exactly what you’re doing; the only difference being that they haven’t put up that wall yet.
If Gov’t regulations made it prohibitively expensive to eat out, you’d discover the benefits of cooking for yourself, Netflix, and “Chill”.
Half the time when I travel, I just load up a cooler with eats, especially fresh fruit. Now that I’m pushing 60, there’s enough issues with “fast food” on a long drive where one SITS, never mind the high prices for poor quality chow. The dregs of the mess on a nuclear boat at the end of a cruise are far better than “McDumpster’s” or “Barfer King”, or “Kentucky Fried Buzzard”, or “Taco Hell”, and so on…
Doug, normally I would agree, but in the case of food the problem is that all this fast food, and junk food is so addictive, people will continue to pay for it until they ran out of money. They’ll pay for it just like a heroin or cocaine addict will pay for his fix. People have to get really sick before even a few will wise up and start eating right.
Laptops are shitty and the service is poor; same story with internet and cable/satellite providers as well. They don’t have to mandate computers because eventually they’ll be giving them away. They’re already giving away smart phones to the impoverished, and some cities have free wifi. They want to know what you’re doing online. They want to see what you’re doing so they have to give it away to those who can’t afford it. They may eventually mandate it, but they will give you the computer.
Voiture sans permis
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35210572
NEVs would work well with this concept
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle
Hi Warp,
More freedom in France than in America… thanks for finding this!
Very interesting idea the French had. I think in the US things like golf carts are handled by a homeowners insurance policy.
Do you really think you can just start being an insurer in Illinois today? Somehow I don’t think Allstate and State Farm allow it to be that easy. Not to mention other insurance companies that have or used to have HQs in Illinois.
Doubt Allstate will be HQ in Illinois much longer either.
Their HQ looked about the same last I bothered to look at it while driving past. I’ll take a look next time I’m over by there.
I live in Normal, IL, and lived in Bloomington from the time I was four until I was in my twenties. State Farm’s corporate headquarters is here.
State Farm is the main employer here (Mitsubishi’s old plant once was a second, but no longer), and the combined area has a population something like 130K. I have met exactly two decent people who worked for State Farm- the rest have uniformly been self-important narcissists, some even acting like the company is a fraternity for the landed classes, the commoners unworthy of basic courtesy or consideration. It’s a reliable predictor of how much of a douche someone will be if she mentions that she works at “the farm”, as well as how awful a driver he will likely be. Their two-campus (once three) headquarters is responsible for screwing up all traffic flow patterns in this town pretty much daily, not just with volume but with abject stupidity behind the wheel. (Part of it seems to be from transferring in people who have never seen rain before on a road, let alone snow or ice in the winter, but a lot of it is just ego and ignorance.)
If you want an example of a thoroughly diseased company culture that actively repels the poor plebs who brush up against it- not even as customers, but just as neighbors- State Farm works quite well. It’s not like Country Financial (also Bloomington) is an angelic vision, but at least the employees there don’t tend to cause a slew of social and vehicular incidents with the locals as they look down upon them.
Hi Mike,
I burn like Solzynitsyn with hate toward the insurance mafia. I always use that qualifier – mafia – because it makes my point in just one word. They are a mafia. The worst sort imaginable because it’s a legal one. You have a privately owned racket (it’s not a business) that enjoys a legal mandate compelling people to hand over their money to it in return for “services” they don’t want, at jacked-up prices.
Why isn’t there outrage? Bad as socialism is, at least you’re not being fleeced for the profit of a huge corporate cartel.
Americans are cattle, in the main.
Having seen Allstate’s campus from the expressway and Willow road as well as having been to the office park that was Kemper insurance the amount of people they employ and needing all that space sure explains the rates. And they used to have a cop on willow road for Allstate. They finally put a traffic light in.
And trying to do the same with guns by prohibiting 18-20 year olds from buying rifles and shotguns.
Worst part is the kids are helping forge their own shackles.
Yet, put this kid in UNIFORM, and we’ll trust with with an M-16 or M-4 carbine, or an M249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon). Or to drive a 70-ton Abrams Main Battle Tank.
I find it ironic that the same Dummycrats that were, as youngsters, chanting, “Old enough to fight is old enough to VOTE” are the same, in their dotage, that now want to keep young adults in perpetual adolescence, especially with regard to their Second Amendment rights.
The kids I went to highschool with who were successful at keeping their car legal, I later learned tended to have multiple legit part-time gigs, and on occasion some participated in other less legit work on the side. They hustled because we were all dying to skip having to take the bus to school. Dunno what motivates them these days, I guess the new freedom is ordering a car via app.
It seems all relative to me Eric. I started driving in 1982, and I remember it well that insurance (just the min.) was $1200/year for me. Granted it was a ’69 GTO Judge, but it is what it was. So I too had to decide to pay the insurance that month or forgo the new tires I needed. The sad part of the story is I paid the insurance to keep driving, and hope the belts didn’t start showing. Then I hydroplaned (didn’t know what that was), and she centerpunched a pole. Delete one numbers matching GTO Judge (like I knew what that was at 16). I just wanted something different than all the SS’s. Sorry to all Pontiac fans. The car did live on, but not numbers matching.
I think my kids are currently paying $2300? But we make them get full coverage or they don’t drive. So we help them with it (some of the overage over min. lia.) because they certainly need to have skin in the game to understand it all.
Hi Chris,
We’re about the same age, so I remember that period well. And we were driving V8 muscle cars… I had a ’78 Camaro; buddy had a ’71 GTX 440… can you imagine what the quote would be today for a V8 muscle car? The $3k average cost quoted in the article assumes an ordinary grocery getter – a beater Civic or some such.
I would bet you a ham sandwich that the cost to insure a V8 muscle car would be $5k or more…
It’s really not relative, today’s costs are much higher, not only in real terms, but adjusted for inflation as well. I started driving in 66, my first full time job out of high school paid 95 bucks a week. And that was a crappy minimum wage type job. Insurance for the year was 120 dollars. So as an 18 year old, I could pay my insurance for the whole year with less than 2 weeks pay. Don’t think anyone can do that now on a minimum wage job.
Agreed, Vz –
In the ’80s, I was able to afford a V8 Camaro (1978), the car/gas and insurance… on my part-time McDonald’s job/lawn mowing income… try it today…
As a point of reference of what insurance is now on a fast car for a kid (even this was about 10 years ago) back when I was working with a consultancy firm became friends with one of the directors of one of our clients – he was also into cars. He told me, his kid did very well and got a scholarship to a top uni and as a gift he got him a nearly new M5 – this was in about 06 and the car was about £50k then. The insurance premium of a 19 year old on that car – £7k!!!! The moral-unless your dad is a director or something – you’re not having a fast car as a teenager……
Maybe you guys are right on the ‘relative’ part. I just thought $1200 35 years ago compared to $2500 today is a wash. I don’t know the inflation numbers.
But if I remember a 1982 Firebird was 10K new? so insurance would have been 15% of cost?
Today a 35K new car (camaro?) is $3-5K for insurance?
Relative?
Hi Chris,
The thing to focus on here is the average cost – $3,000 – which isn’t for a “sporty” much less a “high performance” car. Kids can’t afford to drive hand-me-down Civics and Camrys. Forget anything like the V8 muscle cars we drove back in the ’80s!
I hope we can agree to disagree. And maybe most can’t now, I don’t know. But not everyone did back then either.
If I remember, it was only the one’s that killed themselves all summer doing hard labor, and then work late nights after wrestling (etc…) practice all week that did it.
My experience was I had a great job ‘back then’ for $5/hr. Made my way.
My same age kid today got a great job for $20/hr and is making his way.
We both had/have sporty cars.
Teenage car budgets have cloverian issues hitting them from all sides. First is that wages have been stagnant for decades which hurts the low end hard. Second the medical cartel where the smallest thing costs a fortune. Third the over top responses by government then charged to the insurance companies. Fourth the decline in how youth are raised leading to more costly responsibility issues. Fifth mandatory insurance that still requires covering the uninsured. Sixth the high cost of vehicle repairs and vehicles themselves thanks to diminishing returns mandatory stuff. Ok I’ll stop there… but it’s quite a convergence.
With all those costs even if one teen out of a hundred was a problem it would take charging the 99 quite a bit to make up for it.
Wasn’t even like that 15 years ago.
There are serious disadvantages to where I live, but auto insurance isn’t one of them. Putting my kids’ four-banger cars on my insurance policy, liability only, costs them only around 220$ a year each, and that’s even when they were teens. Has something to do with it being a family plan–I suspect if they bought a policy on their own it would be far more expensive.
Eric’s story about the reverseless Datsun reminded me of my second car, a very used ’63 Rambler with stick shift. For some reason reverse not only didn’t work but the car couldn’t back up even in neutral. (I had no money to fix it.) Drove fine forward, but those occasions when I pulled unthinkingly into a parking spot put me in a bind. One time a fellow worker pulled the car out with a front-end loader. Them were the days.
IF the insurer would even cover it, Eric. Plus, as you’ve noted in other articles, how many youngsters would get an real ‘Murican muscle car, and learn how to wrench it? Most that have any performance interest at all are buying some Jap crap and ‘ricing’ them out! Also, that ’71 GTX, if it has a 383 or 440, and is in good condition, will fetch at least $35K, so the few fathers with the means to buy their kids one will buy one for himself instead, and keep it in the garage and only take it out on the weekends!
Hi Doug,
Yup… sadly so.
Here’s even more sadness: My buddy the Stu Monster got his ’71 GTX in 1986 for $2,700. It was all original and a solid #3 bordering on #2 car. 440 4 BBL with 727 Torqueflite and slapstick shifter. It beat the hell out of my ’78 Camaro!
When I occasionally catch up with my old friends from school/college one of the fondest memories we talk about are that of the old piece of shit cars we used to ride around in, and all the crazy stuff that happened back in the day because of the car… and trust me they were pieces of shit, and barely legal (even in Karachi where I was living then). But we didn’t care, we knew it was our only hope, and drove them the best we could…… Most kids in their late teens/early 20s cant imagine this today, especially in the west. Quite sad actually thinking my kids will never go through that sort of thing….. And another thing I remember back at that age it was shameful for a kid to use public transport…. whatever you had you needed your own ride…. today kids seem to gladly use public transport…. perhaps it is the price which has just killed the kids desire to even think about their own car….
Teens are being oppressed, and it’s not just with car insurance, but freedom in general. It’s illegal for businesses to hire them for lots of things, or below a certain age, parents are terrified of the world and rarely allow them to go out by themselves anymore, and these poor kids don’t get to experience the world other than as chaperoned sheep with no freedom, it’s horrible. I had my first job at twelve years old (illegally of course), after that, I mowed lawns and shoveled snow which was ok in the 1980’s. Today in California, for example, if I hire a kid to cut my grass, for that time, he’s legally an employee, so if he gets hurt, I’m responsible for his medical treatment. I have to issue him forms to sign, but even if I don’t, I’ll owe thing like workers comp insurance and payroll taxes. F**k that stuff, it simply means I hire bonded contractors to do the work – a legal arrangement no kid is going to set up.
The world is a complicated mess. I’ve experienced communism, I lived under it and fled to this country. It’s not the same country which saved us from the commies anymore.
Agree OL, however there are always way around all the nonsense. Was very hard to teach our teens to be bold and question, with respect, everything. Many fights with lib teachers later, and learning to say ‘no I will not’ or ‘I will do this instead’, or ‘please stop teaching us your opinion’, my young adults are going into the real world with huge advantages over their peers that ‘toe the line’, or a get scared to question for fear of retribution.
And it was refreshing to see during school when they questioned a lib teachers ridiculous propaganda, that they learned to welcome the opportunity to go see the principle. I only had to go in the first time. They went 20+ times, and the results were fantastic. There is hope if we teach them.
As for jobs, there are always ways around the BS. Always will be too.
Yes, there are ways around – that take constant work and diligence. I, too, am raising my kids to be independent thinkers, but it’s a constant fight against the system. Maybe my teenage memories are colored by the happiness of youth, but I don’t remember having to fight against the constant pressure.
Homeschooling makes it a little bit easier to raise kids to be more independent and to think critically.
Hi Jeff,
Yes. If I ever have kids, that’s what I would do. The idea of turning them over to government schools, in order to be taught by a transqueer Latinix or some such is just too awful to contemplate.
All these clovers make everything needlessly complex and most people just accept it. Then they wonder where everything that used to be went. Well people stopped doing it or never started because its too complex. Sometimes the effect is decades later because the existing businesses could manage and then when the owners retired and nobody took over because of all the BS involved… The old timers boiled slowly but a newcomer looks at it and just walks away from the idea.
Quite the opposite OL, the west is now the communism that East Europe experienced for 40 years. While the Easterners now enjoy the freedom we used to have. It’s the same here in Australia now also.
Who will save US from the DOMESTIC “Commies”??
Doug, that’s why they send all “the troops” off halfway around the world to kill and oppress some poor slobs who have never harmed anyone- so that they are not HERE to defend their own families and communities from our real enemies, whom our neighbors keep voting for.
Was only paying $135 a month for a 11 Xterra and 13 Silverado. Clean record except for a ticket I vanished through deferred adjudication (East Texas Speed Trap). Then came hurricane Harvey. Ballooned our rate up to $175 a month to cover their losses on retards and the unfortunate who lost their cars to flooding. I feel more people were stupid and swamped their car honestly but not my business. I tried quote shopping and couldn’t find anything lower than $225. Guess I’m stuck with this albatross…
I’ve come to learn that lots of people operate on a different plane than the rest of us. Some people will simply allow a natural disaster to destroy their car so they can get the insurance payout to buy something else. There’s the beauty of socializing things. Even though insurance companies often pay less than just selling it would they’ll have it get flooded. Of course insurance companies now will write policies to cover the upside down on the loan condition which only further encourages people to just have their cars destroyed by mother nature.
The USSR used to be an evil Communist country and the US was a free country.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the USA became the evil police state.
Now the elites want to start WWIII with Russia to kill off white people, distract Americans, and make money from their defense stocks.
Anyone who supports a war with Russia is just a tool for the 1%.
https://truth-zone.net/forum/public-zone.html
A good website to see whats really happening in the Donbask and Nazi/US Backed Ukraine.
http://nrt24.ru/en
Russia Insider is good as well.
Hi Libertarian,
Yes. I was on the radio talking about this very thing the other day. About the dreary fact that in terms of everyday liberty, the average Russian has more than the average American. They can ride a bicycle without a helmet, for instance – and not have to worry about Hut! Hut! Hut! stormtroopers accosting them at gunpoint for their “safety.”
America isn’t anymore.
Living where I do (numerous Russian immigrants around the chicago area these days) I think the average Russian has more freedom in the USA than the people who were born here.
Hi Eric,
In Missouri, we had check points since at least the late ’70’s. I place the blame for checkpoints on M.A.D. Insurance was painfully expensive even with being added to a parents policy. The insurance mafia claims that teenagers are high risk drivers. That was and is true, but I have had far more old people pull right out in front of me than youngsters. When youngsters do something like that, it is on purpose and they have the throttle floored. The old people pulling out in front of you either did not see you at all or can no longer calculate the time it would take for you to get there, then the oldster will creep along well below the speed limit. I believe that the insurance mafia is purposely subsidizing the oldsters by adding extra risk charges to the teenagers.
Yes. This is profoundly depressing. There are ways to get around this, but the noose is definitely tightening. Yeah. Back in 2000, I had changed insurance companies from USAA to Progressive in search of lower rates and fairer treatment (for an unrelated claim) than USAA gave. I went through the long quote process over the phone and was told how much my insurance would be. I disclosed my 3 moving violations on my record at the time. When I got my bill, I assumed that it was for three months. I paid it. The next month, I got another bill and then called them. They explained to me that I had not “disclosed” my driving record (even though I did. I hung up the phone called Allstate, got a much more reasonable quote, instated insurance with them and then dumpmed progressive. Progressive then ratted me out to the NC DMV. I had to prove to the government proles that I had insurance. Pissed me the hell off. I can’t imagine the shit people have to put up with these days.
Be very careful signing up with any insurance company that advertises heavily. It’s well known that Geico, while they have low rates, never ever pays a claim. Either to the policy holder or the other party. State Farm pulled out of Florida rather than pay post-hurricane claims. And Progressive (which used to be the company that wouldn’t look at speeding tickets when setting rates) has become rule-following dweebs.
“State Farm pulled out of Florida rather than pay post-hurricane claims.”
In 2009 State Farm “pulled out” of Florida, but only in the sense that they stopped selling new policies there and declined to renew expiring ones. Do you have evidence that State Farm did not pay claims in Florida that it was obligated to pay under the terms of its policies? Do you think the company should be forced by the government to keep selling policies if it doesn’t want to?
Keep in mind that an insurance policy is a contract, and the underwriter should not be expected to pay for losses from perils that are not covered. Unlike drivers, homeowners are still free not to have insurance if they don’t want it. But government has nevertheless interfered massively through the National Flood Insurance Program. After a hurricane, you will always see lots of fights over what damage was caused by wind (covered by State Farm or whoever) and what was caused by flooding (covered by NFIP). And then of course there’s FEMA, which will bail out the deadbeats who had neither – if the damage is widespread enough to make the network news.
Hi Roland,
This is why (well, one of the reasons why) I moved to a mountain-top locale, where floods are a non-issue and the other natural disaster threats slim to none. I cancelled my home insurance a decade ago. It has saved me close to $20,000 to date.
Yep, although we’re not on top of a mountain, if our home ever floods everybody’d better start gathering the animals and building an ark. We’re in tornado and hail country, however, so I’m not comfortable self-insuring entirely. It’s obvious you’ve done the math and can sleep at night, so good for you.
Hi Roland,
Yup!
The big threat in my neck is ice storms, but I cut down most of the potentially threatening trees.. still have a few to go, but overall I judge the risk to be slight. Meanwhile, I actually saved some money by not tithing the Mafia, so I have some money if I need to pay for something going awry with the house!
I fully expect the collectivist authoritarian majority to decree that guys like me must buy home insurance, on the same basis as they’ve already decreed I must buy health insurance.