This looks like a claim that car owners should be required to have even more insurance, which seems inconsistent with your claim that widespread car ownership is the product of onerous regulation.
All in all I think this is a pretty glib take that I’ve seen enough times that I’m bored with it. Suffice to say that most of the regulations you’re complaining about mostly postdate the widescale adoption of cars. Nobody was instituting parking minimums or insurance mandates ahead of time in order to encourage car ownership; instead, as soon as car companies figured out how to make cars cheaply enough that even their own factory workers could afford them, governments made regulations in response to the overwhelming number of cars that everyone ended up buying.
But that’s a fundamentally different mindset. Back then, living in a democracy where everybody was buying cars meant that the government’s job was to notice that people wanted to drive cars and work to accommodate that. These days, people think the government’s job is to decide for us what we should want and then shape the regulatory environment in such a way as to shape our behavior, because they know better than we do.
>which seems inconsistent with your claim that widespread car ownership is the product of onerous regulation.
how is this inconsistent? Insurance raises have to be approved at the state level, again this is not a free market, and for political reasons many states have kept insurance rates at decades old price levels. Insurers actually lose money in most places because they cannot raise prices. (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...) and as a result often health insurance and other institutions have to cover the cost, which is to say the public pays.
Just to see how absurd this is. Minimum liability in a lot of states is 50k. In Germany and much of Europe minimum liability is seven million.
It's the governments job to take externalities into account and design urban environments rationally, not to coddle car obsessed consumers and have everyone else pay for the cost they impose on others and the environment.
> Just to see how absurd this is. Minimum liability in a lot of states is 50k. In Germany and much of Europe minimum liability is seven million.
Without regulation, minimum liability would be zero.
> It's the governments job to take externalities into account and design urban environments rationally, not to coddle car obsessed consumers
Finally your true colors come out. You believe the government’s job is to decide for us what we should want and then shape the regulatory environment in such a way as to shape our behavior, because they know better than we do. You’re the authoritarian trying to redesign society. Just own up to it and be honest with yourself instead of cynically and disingenuously trying to argue based on principles you don’t even hold.
This looks like a claim that car owners should be required to have even more insurance, which seems inconsistent with your claim that widespread car ownership is the product of onerous regulation.
All in all I think this is a pretty glib take that I’ve seen enough times that I’m bored with it. Suffice to say that most of the regulations you’re complaining about mostly postdate the widescale adoption of cars. Nobody was instituting parking minimums or insurance mandates ahead of time in order to encourage car ownership; instead, as soon as car companies figured out how to make cars cheaply enough that even their own factory workers could afford them, governments made regulations in response to the overwhelming number of cars that everyone ended up buying.
But that’s a fundamentally different mindset. Back then, living in a democracy where everybody was buying cars meant that the government’s job was to notice that people wanted to drive cars and work to accommodate that. These days, people think the government’s job is to decide for us what we should want and then shape the regulatory environment in such a way as to shape our behavior, because they know better than we do.