Comes now Jack Baruth at Hagerty with a rebuttal to another Hagerty contributor (!) who says, “You don’t need that half-ton pickup truck.” Where “don’t need” is actually “shouldn’t be allowed to own”, because half-ton pickup trucks are destroying the world or some shit.
Baruth in turn makes a (half)* ton of great points, including that the McClaren Senna is a much worse gas hog than his Silverado 6.2 fully loaded and towing a race car trailer. (Admittedly I don’t believe many of us own a McClaren Senna, but that’s not the point.)
Sadly, his article is just another example exposing how a small group of the Perennially Indignant seek to force the vast bulk of American citizens to bend to their will. It doesn’t seem to matter what the subject is — something that none of the rest of us find unusual or particularly dangerous becomes the cause du jour for regulation and banning. Guns are only one part of this breakdown of the concept of liberty. The Brits have proven that once you ban guns, knives are next. Hell, they’ll probably ban hammers after they finish putting GPS trackers in knives. (H/T: Tamara Keel, on Facebook yesterday. And yes, that moron is a sitting MP.)
Other whinging ninnies have managed to get whole cities to put consumption taxes on sugary drinks and other food items they find repulsive, despite the fact that people simply go outside the tax zone to obtain them and businesses inside the city limits suffer as a result. Yes, I’m talking about you, Philadelphia.
Still other do-gooder microcephalics with no more understanding of economics than AOC with her alleged degree in same pass $15 minimum wage laws in their jurisdictions, and then, shockingly, complain when their favorite restaurants and stores close because the owners can’t afford to pay that kind of wages.
But getting back to pickup trucks, shoot, we’re already seeing de-facto attempts to ban large vehicles from city centers, what with heavily-traveled city streets being made even harder to navigate with unused bike lanes and idiotic mass-transit choices like Indianapolis’s highly-touted, over-priced, and frankly damned dangerous** Red Line bus route that is currently a-building. The last federal administration bent over backwards to raise gasoline efficiency ratings so high that Ford started building trucks with lightweight aluminum bodies that seem to catch fire at the drop of a hat, and tried to restrict the fracking industry that — under the current administration — has brought the price of a gallon of gas down to something reasonable for the first time in four decades and made auto manufacturers throw up their hands and stop building high-gas-mileage sedans because nobody wants them anymore.
And face it, what are you going to pull that 30-foot Airstream with? You’re not going to do it with a Prius.
The fact is that nobody has the authority to tell Mr. Baruth, or me, or any other American that they can’t own a pickup truck. Even if Congress passed such a law, you’d have to ask whether that actually falls under the aegis of one of the Constitution’s enumerated powers. I don’t think it does, much as I don’t think most of what the Federal Government does in these fading years of the American Republic passes enumerated powers muster. But let’s see what Jack Baruth has to say about that:
Does your neighbor own a King Ranch with a squeaky-clean bed and a completely useless lift kit? Well, thank your deity of choice that you live in a place where you don’t have the right to regulate his enthusiasms and he, in turn, does not have the right to regulate yours, lest you find yourself discomfited by what he considers to be necessary, tasteful, or appropriate.
Fuckin’ A, brother. Fuckin’ A.
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* Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
** It will be just as dangerous as the old interurban rail was, particularly considering that there are a fuckload more private vehicles on the streets today and that cell-phone-wielding pedestrians cross streets in a manner more resembling Brownian motion than any sort of organized, disciplined “cross only at the crosswalk and only when you have the WALK light, and GODDAMNIT PUT THAT FUCKING CELL PHONE DOWN AND PAY ATTENTION” way.