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Traffic Laws and Psychological Conditioning

By Gordon Francis Corbett

      Nobody can deny that traffic laws and their enforcement save many lives annually.

    Nevertheless, the ostensible reasons for some traffic laws do not add up, and that fact leaves us free to speculate about their true purposes.

    Consider speed limits.  People should not drive through school zones at fifty miles per hour, through residential areas at seventy miles per hour, or on urban freeways at ninety miles per hour.  Such speeds deny a driver the time needed to avoid collisions and may cause accidents between others trying to avoid him.  Here, the slogan, "Slow down and live," makes sense, as do laws forbidding speed too dangerous for road and traffic conditions.

    Also, with age, reaction times slow;  cataracts, glaucoma, and other disorders impair the eyes;  and senility destroys the mental clarity needed for motoring safety.  These and other conditions necessitate special restrictions on, and revocation of, individual elderly people's licenses, even though these drivers be very conscientious.

    Nevertheless, some laws have other, and perhaps more sinister, purposes.  Limiting speeds on rural highways whose traffic levels, visibility, and numbers of lanes permit great speed protects nobody, but it does let jurisdictions fine peaceable motorists speeding to reach distant destinations.  It also makes these drivers, whose speed endangers no one, develop the habit of looking in their rear-view mirrors.

    There is something wrong with a legal structure that forces a constant wariness of authority on the innocent person.  Needless traffic laws, income tax laws, and laws that prohibit smoking tobacco in public all combine to make the peaceable citizen regard government with hostility because they infringe on his rightful prerogatives.

    Not all laws treat adult citizens as though they were stupid and greedy children.  Others regard them as potential criminals, making the people see those who pass and enforce these rules in the same way.  To paraphrase Edmund Burke, when rulers are tyrants from policy, subjects will be rebels by nature.

    We Americans began by hiring servants whom we imprisoned in a Constitutional cage, and told to protect our individual's rights.

Subsequently, moving in glacial increments, using one excuse after another, these servants have built their power until, today, they stand on the threshold of tyranny.  Unless we stop them, we will find our Constitution abolished, our rights outlawed, and us in the cage.

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