Ask most conservatives what they think about public transportation, and they'd probably tell you that they don't like it. And it's not just because of the smell and the gum stuck to the seats. Most of us conservatives, deep down inside, at least in some subconscious way, feel that mass public transportation is just a little bit communist.
After all, we conservatives like our freedom. That's probably a lot of the reason why we're in love with the automobile. With the wide open spaces and abundant road system we enjoy in America, conservatives would never dream of trying to force everyone to use an archaic, 19th century technology like trains, now that we don't have to. The automobile is a symbol of freedom. You can go wherever there's a road, no matter how big or small, when you're in an automobile. You're not boxed in with dozens of other people on a line that goes one place only. This is why we generally tend to view air travel as a necessary evil – if somebody invented a car that could get us from Boston to Los Angeles in six hours for a business meeting, we'd probably opt for that, instead of getting groped by your friendly neighborhood TSA agent.
Leftists know all of this. They know that the freedom to travel where we want, when we want, how we want, is a psychological buttress to our sense of liberty. Serfs stay put and go where they're told. Free men hop into their '67 Mustang and lay rubber in front of a Dairy Queen three states away from their own.
Hence, in their never-ending quest to gain total control over our lives, the Left has been putting into play a number of plans designed to limit our freedom of travel.
As I alluded in my previous essay, one of the purposes that are served by forcing gasoline prices sky-high is to make private automobile travel prohibitively expensive. This has been a major thrust in the "global warming" nonsense that the Left has pushed as well – cars account for the lion's share of CO2 emissions, so their use needs to be reduced. Another step in this direction was hinted at last week when somebody in the Congressional Budget Office accidentally let the cat out of the bag that it would be a great, absolutely smashing, idea to tax Americans for each mile they drive. Which is essentially what already happens to us anywise, since we have to pay taxes on each gallon we buy to drive those miles. Presumably, this mileage tax would be added on top of the gas taxes already in place.
The whole point to this is not to "stop global warming." Let's face it, those in the know at the top of the Leftist hierarchy know that global warming is a hoax. They know it's just prole-feed for the useful idiots in their own ranks and for the easily swayable among the public at-large. The point to getting people to stop driving cars is not to save the earth, but to reduce the freedom of movement that people have. Take away cars, and you take away the ability of most people to travel for pleasure. You take away their means of conducting much of their commerce and other business. You would prevent them from being able to have forest hideaways and beach homes. In short, you prevent the middle and working classes from having the same things that the rich can have, you keep them from having lifestyles that even approach the type, if not the extent, of the global transnational elite. Most of all, you would take away that psychological sense of freedom that the ability to move about unhindered gives to people.
So, what would have to replace private automobile travel, once nobody but the super-rich can afford it? Public mass transportation, of course. Buses, light rail, subways. This has already largely happened to those poor unfortunates who dwell within our large cities, and for whom the lack of parking, expensive personal property taxes, and archaic road systems have already removed the automobile from being a viable alternative. The lefties work to extend this system even to places, such as smaller cities, the suburbs, and even the exurbs, where such systems normally would not be "needed" or desired. Make parking in the city so scarce as to be impossible to find, or so expensive that you'd rather take the bus. Provide "free" bus service (paid for by the taxes of productive, automobile-driving people, of course) to encourage people to stop polluting. In several places, the lefties keep trying to push their light rail boondoggles so that the system can be extended between cities – no more need to have people killing Mother Gaia with highway driving. These public systems are there to take up the slack once private transportation is turned into road pizza.
So how does this affect our freedom? Well, it's because of the fact that mass transportation is inherently restrictive in its approach to people delivery. A bus route can't include every single possible place that people might want to get on or off the bus. It only follows certain routes. Same with AmTrak, with light rail, subways, etc. It's easier, then, to control the access which people have to transportation.
To see this, we need only look at what the government has done to air travel in this country. You cannot get onto a commercial airplane without going through an intrusive TSA security checkpoint. Consider then, the effect of the "no fly" list, which at last count had something like a million names on it – the large majority of them people who have no connection to Islamic terrorism. Think about that for a minute. That means that one out of every three hundred persons in this country are forcibly disallowed from conducting a private commercial transaction with an airline for transportation by their own government, mostly for spurious reasons. Consider this, then, in light of the rumblings from certain government officials (such as Senator Chuck Schumer, D-NY), to extend the TSA "security" system to Amtrak and to commercial bus lines. Given the broad, general language that "authorizes" the TSA to exist and function, how long before these extensions become a reality, and are then extended further to city buses, light rail, subways, and the rest? After all, the TSA has been given jurisdiction over pretty much all transportation in the country, should it decide to use it. Think this is far-fetched? I don't. There are some in government who've already floated these very ideas.
Can you imagine finding yourself on the "do not ride/fly" list and having no access to even local mass transportation, much less intercity and interstate travel, especially after you've already been squeezed out of being able to afford driving your car for any distance? Even the threat of that would be a powerful inducement for many people to begin to adopt the psychology of the serf, which is exactly what the Left wants. Be a good boy. Don't express those bad ideas that we don't like, and will therefore brand as "terroristic," earning you a spot on "The List." It's not inconceivable that to even use these systems, you'd have to be issued an approved pass, as much an approval of your political and social docility as anything else.
After all, "your papers, please" has been one of the watchwords of tyrants throughout history.
Think this all would never happen? Don't put anything past the Left in this country. Remember – when we're talking about the Left, we're talking about sociopaths who do everything they do for the purpose of increasing their own power and control over us. Even something as seemingly innocent as public transportation exists because of the Left's ulterior purposes for it. Make cars so expensive and bothersome that people will look for other means of travel. Provide them those means, but make them means of transportation that have easy control points. Use those control points to threaten the economic and social livelihood of those forced to use them. You know, it's so crazy, it just might work.
What can we do? We can resist the drive toward public transportation by electing representatives at all levels of government who will do several things, provided they are within the competence of their offices to do so (i.e. some of these will be at the national or state level, while others at the local):
• Drill for oil and increase our own domestic oil supply.
• Oppose all mileage or similar taxes.
• Oppose boondogglish mass transit systems like the light rails.
• Use transportation funds to modernize road systems to better handle traffic volume and flow.
• Oppose the subsidy of public transportation by taxes levied on automobiles, which serve as a transportational "wealth redistribution" scheme.
• Oppose the extension of TSA authority over other modes of travel, and even roll back TSA's control over air travel.
In short, basically just do the things that will make transportation more, rather than less, freedom friendly.
As with everything else we propose, this can be done – provided we're willing to do the heavy lifting of working to get our people elected, and then holding their feet to the fire after they're in office. We can, and must, make the freedom of travel remain a reality for the American people.
