I’m surprised that you went overseas for an example. I know enough about CARB (California Air Resources Board) to know they step way beyond their chartered purpose to clean up auto emissions and actually dictate which accessories you may or may not install on your private property. I’m not sure exactly how they work but isn’t there also fourth amendment-violating “random spot checks”?

Tino:

I’ve done some thinking about this very issue, and my conclusion is…

Indeed. I actually scraped your site for something to link to rather than writing my own post. You have a few posts tangently related to the topic, but nothing specifically.

You solution lacks a critical step. You must actually start issuing actual coupon books first before you switch to the EBT card. That way you can claim all sorts of efficiency improvements when you upgrade.

tgirsch has responded to this post, where he claims that due to CAFE standards. fuel efficiency in autos has doubled. Unfortunately, the “goal” is to use less fuel per capita, and that little statistic seems to have remained flat. Once I settle on who to cite, writing the rebuttal ought to be fun.

The Left wants desperately to keep people from driving vehicles that are ‘too big’, or ‘too inefficient’; to keep people from living in ‘McMansions’, i.e. houses that are ‘too big’; to keep them from eating Twinkies, red meat, and other things are are ‘unhealthy’: you can probably come up with similar examples for every field of human endeavor.

The obvious answer is to tax the hell out of all of these things, as the government already does with liquor, cigarettes, etc.; but they’re very sensitive to charges that such taxes hurt ‘the poor’ and ‘minorities’ — for instance, your drywall contractor — while not having that much of an effect on ‘the rich’.

The solution? Licensing and rationing. Everyone would get some kind of EBT card as are currently used for food stamps; Twinkies, gasoline, etc. could only be purchased with the appropriate ration points. Large vehicles could only be registered upon presentation of some kind of official certification that you ‘needed’ the vehicle because of your employment (drywall contractor, *licensed* plumber, community organizer, etc.) or because of the size of your family (if you haul kids around, remember that of late all vehicles have at least one less legal seat than they used to), or because you have sufficient pull.

Not only would this keep ‘the rich’ from consuming more than their ‘fair share’, but it would create an enormous bureaucracy and allow the government another point of leverage over ‘sex offenders’, ‘drug abusers’, scofflaws, etc., etc.

As I said: I don’t think this is at all likely, because I think that Americans would instinctively recoil from something like this — not because it doesn’t fit perfectly well with how much of the governing class sees the populace.