License to Drive
Keep in mind that this is NOT a defense of licensure!
Driving is one of the most dangerous things we do. This is true very broadly as it has a very high death rate associated with it and obviously is very widespread across society as an activity.
We license people once in a formal process—a bare bones written and performance test when they are generally quite young—and then we just . . . let them keep doing it.
We don’t make them requalify. Once you have a license, you get to keep it until you actively do something to have it taken away. Rather than proving you are still capable of driving, we make you prove you are incapable of driving to lose the privilege.
Sure, we make you renew it every few years—mine is valid now for 10 years even though it has been 34 years since I’ve taken a driving test. But this renewal process doesn’t have anything at all to do with driving. It is just perfunctory as a means of keeping your records up with the state and giving them another tribute. (Some might say this is a clever trick of big brother to get your information and a little more of your money.)
“How can this be?!?”
Well, we do actually make you retake a test—many tests, in fact. These include the more formal like obtaining and maintaining insurance as well as informal like norms. Ever been criticized for your driving by friends or, worse, shunned as a driver with someone else volunteering to do the driving for the group over your offer? Ever been honked at?
In the case of the formal test that is insurance, the state has wisely outsourced this role as it requires proof of insurance at the time of renewal. This is tantamount to them admitting, “We aren’t really any good at certifying you as a driver, but we know they are.”
Astonishingly, this system works. [narrator, “It is not, actually, that astonishing.”] Sure, driving is super dangerous. But who among us is so naïve as to think that the solution to the danger is more trips to the DMV? Haven’t they done enough already?
Why can we not apply this model to SO MANY OTHER THINGS that instead we burden ourselves with having the government do to/for us? More directly, why is it so hard for so many of us to understand that the government failure we currently tolerate is completely avoidable?
I understand for sure the captured interest problem whereby those who directly benefit from the current situation want to keep it just the way it is, thank you very much. But why do the rest of us fall victim to be the Baptists in this Baptists and bootleggers quagmire?
There is also a very big example of tradeoffs at play here (remember, as Thomas Sowell says, “There are no solutions. only tradeoffs.”). With driving we tolerate the danger—balancing it (imperfectly) against the benefits of driving. We don’t lower all speed limits to 10 mph. We don’t make you retake a very rigorous exam every few years or months or whatever. This imperfect balancing works pretty well. And it works much better than how very imperfect it would be if the government was completely in charge.
We do have some government involvement regarding safety. After all, they are setting the speed limits and other driving rules. These are best done at a local level for the most part. Examples like which side of the road we drive on are best set at the highest levels, these are few. Speed limits and such are best executed when tacit knowledge of time and place can be most finely found. That is at the very local level for sure.
Still, it doesn’t have to be government. “But who would own/build/maintain the roads?” so goes the shallow refrain against the libertarian minimal state. Well, we’ve actually solved this long ago.
Besides, even in our current, government-dominated state of rule setting, we have many norms that tend to take over. Compare the speed limit as derived by actual driving to the statutory posted limit. And have you ever heard of the Pittsburgh left?
From a combination of choice and emergence, we are largely but inexplicably self-trapped in a world that drastically favors asking permission rather than forgiveness—all compounded by the mistake of looking exclusively to the government for that permission and guidance. It is something between comical and tragic that we ignore the obvious example of driving that is staring us in the face, continually offering a better way.