CAFE Kills

I ran a link of that name in the Saturday Linkaround this AM, by Michelle Malkin. Little did I know last night when I put the Linkaround to bed, that I would have a graphic example of it in my dead tree paper this morning:

Child killed, another hurt in Hwy. 4 crash

In a detail from the photo by Craig Sanders, we see what's left of a Ford Fusion after having been rear ended by a tow truck.



Notice the back half of the car is gone. The back seat, where the government, having mandated you have a car with airbags, that unfortunately kill small children, tells you to have the children ride, so that they will be "safe". Well, safer! The toddler who died, was riding in the front seat next to the driver. Another child, riding in the back, as prescribed, is in critical condition and may not make it.

Am I against airbags? No. Should the government have mandated them? I think that mandating them before they knew of the unintended consequences was wrong. On the whole, I believe they save lives, but that is small comfort to the person who has lost a loved one to a government mandated "safety device".

But, the CAFE standards, there I am 100% opposed to bureaucrats setting arbitrary fuel standards, contrary to the laws of physics, expecting car manufacturers to make their cars more fuel efficient, typically by making them lighter, without necessarily being correspondingly safer.

Getting the best fuel economy you can is a great idea. Having government impose arbitrary standards that do not take physics or current state of the art technology into consideration is bad policy. (The same goes for arbitrary EPA standards as well.)

And if the government wants to give tax breaks for surpassing current standards, great! Let the manufacturers have an incentive for their R&D. But don't arbitrarily assume that if you were able to achieve a certain percentage improvement in any given year, that the exact same percentage can be produced by government fiat. At least, not at the expense of overall safety.

That child's life, those children's pain and suffering is not worth the price of fuel that their Ford Fusion or any Ford Fusion saves in it's life time because it met some arbitrary government standard.

Maybe the government should be getting out of the way of energy producers so the supply can go up and/ or cutting federal taxes on gasoline so that consumers can afford to buy safer cars, rather than be continually forced into smaller, lighter cars?

In a tie, the win will generally go to the type of car your legislator drives (or is driven in), rather than the one he wants you to drive.