March 23, 2006
American Chromatic Exceptionalism, Addendum Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:25 AM EST I couldn’t agree more with Frederic Schwarz’s elegant post on this country’s frequent exceptionalism and how the New Deal model for dealing with problems is dead as a mackerel. I would add one example of government overreaching in the 1970s. In the 1960s the government had required automobile manufacturers to make seat belts standard equipment. Although many people ignored them, there was little objection. Then, about 1973 or so, Congress, in order to get people to wear the belts, passed a law requiring automobile manufacturers to link the seat belts to the ignition so that the car wouldn’t start unless the seat belts were buckled. When people found out about it—usually in a showroom while they were shopping for a new car—they went ballistic. Dealers couldn’t legally disconnect the system, but local mechanics (who also were forbidden, but wouldn’t likely be caught) did a brisk business in doing exactly that. Congress, finding itself buried in an avalanche of public outrage, hastily repealed this grotesque example of no-dessert-until-you-finish-your-peas government. That experience, perhaps, is why Congress never mandated the metric system but tried to get it adopted by the camel’s-nose-under-the-tent method, which didn’t work either. One other point: I believe right-hand driving is not an American exception, but the choice from the beginning in most countries. Left-hand driving today is found only in Great Britain and most of the old British Empire (Canada being an exception), Japan, and the occasional odd backwater, such as the U.S. Virgin Islands. Much of Scandinavia (including Denmark, which owned the Virgin Islands until 1917) originally had left-hand driving, but Sweden was the last to switch over, in about 1980. For 24 hours no one was allowed to drive at all in Sweden, and then only very slowly for a few days. The only other country that I know about that used to drive on the left was Argentina. It switched from left-hand to right-hand in 1945.
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