From Karl Denninger, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
From the NTSB comes their latest “Most Wanted List”, and it includes some doozies.
One of them is a desire for mandated collision-avoidance (e.g. automated braking, etc) technology in all cars and trucks. Like the previous airbag and ABS mandates this will drive up the cost of vehicles further, a price paid by everyone whether you happen to be attentive or not.
But it’s the booze demand — a drop from 0.08 to 0.05 BAC to define “drunk” — that got my dander up the most.
Here’s why.
An 0.05 standard would render most men legally intoxicated after two beers in a couple of hours. It would also render many women legally intoxicated after one drink, effectively making it impossible for a woman of light body mass and small size to consume any alcohol in a social setting where she might have to operate a vehicle.
The NTSB admits that they have no idea whether such a change in the law would actually reduce drunk-driving injuries and deaths at all, or if it would, by how much.
But let’s cut the crap — the NTSB lies about DUI to begin with. They claim that some 10,000 deaths and about 30% of all accidents “involve” someone who is “impaired.” But they don’t define “impaired” as legally intoxicated; any presence of alcohol is sufficient for said accident to count under their “rules” and what’s worse the person who had the alcohol in their system doesn’t have to have been at fault!
In other words if I go to the bar, have one beer, and on the way home a truck driver falls asleep at the wheel and rams my vehicle from behind, killing me, that counts as an “alcohol-impaired” fatality — even though (1) I was not at fault and (2) the person who was at fault had zero alcohol in their system. The accident is reported this way even if it was logistically impossible for me to evade the wreck (e.g. I’m stopped at a light with cross traffic in the intersection; there is literally nowhere for me to go even if I see it coming.)
Now 10,000 deaths a year, if they’re due to intoxicated driving (but they’re not; see the last two paragraphs) would be bad. The cost to society is terrible, say much less the cost to individual families and people.
But what is the cost of the DUI laws to society?
To continue reading: Time to BIN Our Government
