Lowering the Cost of Car Insurance

Donald Trump has promised he’ll use the power of the presidency, if he gets it, to reduce the cost of car insurance – which has been skyrocketing for everyone, including people who’ve not even received a “ticket”for some trumped-up traffic “offense” that could be used as an excuse to justify charging them more for “coverage.”

“Your automobile insurance is up by 73 percent – vote for Trump, I’ll cut that number in half”!

Which – despite the supercilious lecturing of the consiglieres of the insurance mafia such as Robert Hartwig, of the blandly styled Insurance Information Institute – he could do by what is styled executive order and never mind pedantic legalisms about the “constitution” and what it says a president may and may not do. The communists (call them by their proper name; “Democrats” they aren’t, the last one of those was RFK, Jr.) only object to this business of executive-ordering when it is done by someone the communists don’t like in a way that stymies the advance of communism. It is stupid to play fair with such people.

One plays to win.

“Someone should explain to Trump that insurance – and insurance rates – are regulated by the states, not the federal government,” wheedles Earwig. 

But “regulated” isn’t quite the right word, is it?

In fact, the states – state governments – impose the now-universal requirement to hand over money to the car insurance mafia as the price (one of them) of being allowed to register and operate a car on the government’s roads.

Get it out of your head that there is such a thing as “public” anything. It is either privately owned property or it is government controlled property, in which case it is government property in everything but name. Like the home you don’t actually own, even though it’s you who pay the mortgage and even if you paid off the mortgage. You must continue to pay the government, mustn’t you? In which case, how can you imagine you “own” that which the government can seize if you ever stop paying the government to be allowed to live there?

It’s the same with cars, effectively. You can’t even register (that is, ear-tag) one in most states without handing money over to the insurance mafia. Even if you never operate it on the government’s controlled roads. This pretty much demolishes the mewly justification given for requiring people to hand over money to the insurance mafia in that it’s not even possible to cause harm to someone else on the government’s controlled roads with your car if it never leave your driveway.

“If Trump on Day 1 could wave his hands and reduce auto insurance rates by 50 percent, auto insurance would instantly cease to be sold by any auto insurer in the United States,” says the Earwig. 

“The reason, of course, is that if insurers were compelled to sell auto insurance at 50 percent of the current price this would lead to enormous losses and the eventual insolvency of the insurer – hence they wouldn’t sell any at all.”

Italics added.

“Enormous losses”? Oh, the humanity!

How about the enormous losses incurred by the millions of people who are forced to hand over money to the insurance mafia each year for damage and harm they didn’t cause? It is interesting – revelatory – to note the fact that no one ever gets a refund from the insurance mafia for not causing damage and harm. The revenue stream goes only one way, cap’n.

Hadn’t you heard?

More to the point – the one Trump misses – is the cost of compulsion that’s driving costs up. It is a simple thing to understand, if you’re willing to think about it a little. Anything you’re forced to buy is going to cost more to buy for the simple (and ought-to-be-obvious) reason that you’re forced to buy it. Put another way, when a seller has the power to coerce you to purchase what he’s selling, he has an incentive to sell it to you for more rather than less.

And – in the opposite case – when a seller cannot force you to purchase what he’s selling, he has every incentive to sell it to you for less. More finely, he won’t be able to sell you anything at all – unless you deem that which he’s selling to be worth the money.

That is how Trump could lower the cost of car insurance.

By executive-ordering that no state has the lawful power to force any person to purchase anything, especially the products or services of private, for-profit corporations such as car (and health) insurance mafia. It is not merely that people are being mulcted, as they are via what are styled “taxes” to give theft a better mouth feel. In the case at hand, they are being mulcted for the profit of insurance cartels so wealthy they can afford – among others things – to barrage us with endless, obnoxious TeeVee ads about how we’ll “save” by sending them money! Never mind the marble-floored, glass walled office buildings, executive salaries and so on.

They plead poverty like a Borgia Pope – and are just as insufferable.

Take away the compulsion and insurance companies would be obliged to be reasonable. They would lose the insolent power to summarily increase what they charge and tell people to suck it up, buttercup. Because people could say: “No, I’m not paying that. I haven’t filed a claim. You have no legitimate reason to “adjust” my premium. Make it what it was – or cancel it.”

Imagine that.

You hardly have to. It’s the way it works in what’s left of the free market. No one is forced to eat at Olive Garden and because Olive Garden knows this, it does not charge $50 for a stale roll. The insurance mafia does that, essentially – precisely because it can make you pay $50 for a stale “roll.”

But if it weren’t compulsory then some people would drive without insurance and one of them might hit you and leave you with the bill for the damages!

Absolutely. As if that doesn’t already happen, despite the compulsion. Just the same as people are murdered every day with illegal guns in places like Chicago and DC where it’s illegal for non-criminals to own guns.

The criminals, of course, don’t care about such laws.

Just as “dangerous drunks” continue to drive drunk in spite of laws that say it’s forbidden. Just as there will be people who drive without insurance, regardless of the law that says they are required to buy it. Which – as such – causes no damage or harm to anyone. If they do cause damage or harm, then hold them responsible, by whatever means necessary. Garnish their earnings. Make them work a chain gang. Whatever it takes.

Just stop taking money from people who didn’t damage anything or cause harm to anyone by forcing them to hand it over to the insurance mafia.

. . .

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