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The Joy of the Private Car
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday it will attempt to do what a string of economists and urban planners couldn’t: persuade the Congress to raise the federal gasoline tax to pay for better roads. — The Wall Street Journal
For all the problems that automobiles bring in society, they are wondrous things. They are, in a way, emblems of freedom. Surely private, discreet mobility is nearly beyond price?
There’s a price and a high one at that: pollution, congestion, sprawl, accident lethality and the geopolitics of oil. But oh, the joy of turning the key and heading to a highway; free, anonymous and among your own things (or your own mess, to be precise), listening to your choice of music–your life briefly in your control.
So far, the joys of the personal car have mysteriously evaded the attention of major poets and composers. Maybe it’s because cars bring joy equally to the proletariat and to the elite.
The primary differentiation between vehicles is not aesthetic but financial. A neat car, like a Bentley or a Maybach, costs money, lots of it, compared to, say, a Ford Focus. Yet their function is identical: they move us around.
Just four times in the 100-plus-year history of the automobile has a truly classless–in the sense that blue jeans are classless–car appeared on the streets. These were vehicles driven by the wealthy and the lowly with equal enthusiasm. They were the Ford Model T, the Ford A, the Volkswagen Beetle and the Morris Minor. All were owned and driven across the social spectrum.
It is an American conceit to believe that our love affair with the automobile is unique. It isn’t: It’s as universal as love itself. The poorest Indian dreams of abandoning the bullock cart for the automobile and even Europeans, who are well served with public transportation, love their cars.
One of the first consequences of Irish prosperity was that Dublin became a traffic jam. The Irish folk song goes, In Dublin’s fair city where the girls are so pretty/ I once met a girl named sweet Molly Malone/and she wheeled her wheel barrow/ through the streets broad and narrow/
singing cockles and mussels alive alive oh. Well, Molly would have a hell of a job in today’s traffic.When Britain opened its beltway around London–known as the M25 corridor or Orbital–in 1986, so many cars took to the road traffic stopped dead, despite designated speed of 70 mph.
What has happened in western Europe is that driving has become more of a recreational activity, and commuting to work is close to mandatory. London, for example, is the second great city in the world to impose a stiff charge on private cars entering the downtown. The first was Singapore.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg would like to do something similar in New York City, but he faces too many jurisdictions that feed traffic into the city. Other American cities do not have the public transportation infrastructure to be able to contemplate choking them off during the week.
New housing developments everywhere are antithetical to public transportation. The cul-de-sac is hard enough to get a fire truck into, let alone to run buses.
A second problem, after congestion, is where are we going to get the oil to fuel the fleet of cars which is growing exponentially around the world, with most that growth in China and India? That future, for a period of 60 or so years, could be natural gas or electricity–and the smart money is on electricity. The rub is that batteries are not yet up to the task; and today’s gasoline and diesel automobile needs a lot of power for non-motion functions, like air conditioning, lights, power windows, seats and trunks.
Will electric vehicles reach market fast enough? That depends on the thorny issue of geopolitics, religious fanaticism, royal families, and prosperity in India and China.
How to proceed? The government would like to move everything forward, but the Department of Energy is having difficulty getting research and development money out of the door, while local jurisdictions are cutting back on highway funds.
Enter the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with an unlikely proposal for a business group: a fuel tax devoted to transportation solutions. It’s radical, unexpected and comes from an organization with right-of-center clout.
Maybe one day, we’ll again tool down the open road—well, get into a stream of traffic that moves, whether it’s with hydrocarbon or electric fuel. Varoom! –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Girding Against a Non-Existent Enemy
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There is a new growth industry in Washington; one which will consume hundreds of millions of dollars before it has run its course, and one that is not needed. No, it is not a new government program. It is a new private sector movement to save capitalism, and it is spearheaded by the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce.
The Chamber has committed to raise and spend $100 million on an across-the-board effort to fortify capitalism through media and public affairs campaigns. It will be a big payday for public intellectuals who can whip up an audience about the incipient resurgence of, well, communism, socialism and maybe even monarchy.
Anyway government in general, and the administration of Barack Obama in particular, is sure to figure as the merciless opponent of capitalism, seeking to regulate it and nationalize it out of existence. Only Asia, it would seem, is immune from government’s dead hand. There, in the mythology of the times, governments work for capitalism, as with the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry and the global reach of China.
To be believe this you have to swallow hard and affirm that bureaucrats of Asia are oh-so-smart, while those of the United States and Europe are stupid, incompetent and out to promote failure.
The Chamber, one hastens to point out, is not the villain here; it is, if anything, the victim. A lot of Chamber members really believe that capitalism is endangered by the Obama administration and its preparedness to intrude into markets. This belief has been fed, this paranoia has been indulged by the far-right wing and its protagonists in the blogosphere and broadcasting.
The fact is that capitalism–the world of willing buyers and willing sellers–has been around since the dawn of human history. It is as natural, as native, as fundamental to human society as the quest for God or the organization of the family. Probably as old as the market itself are the rogues who distort the market for excessive gain. Christ did not throw the moneychangers out of the temple for praying too fervently. Nor did Lehman Brothers collapse because it was timid about leverage.
Equally, capitalism has had an historic problem with social justice. No less a philosopher of capital’s virtue than Irving Kristol, inventor of neo-conservatism and father of its proselytizer, Bill Kristol, has pointed out that capitalism would not find fault with slavery or worker exploitation. Other institutions must seek that rectification. In Kristol’s words, “Two cheers for capitalism.”
Capitalism’s great enemy was, of course, Karl Marx and his collaborator,
Frederick Engels (Lenin was an adapter). But after much struggle, communism, or anti-capitalism, failed abysmally. It was the worst social and economic experiment ever and its few remaining adherents, like Cuba, are themselves economic and social failures.
Daniel Yergin, author of “Commanding Heights,” makes the point that capitalism has swept away any thoughts that communism has a future. Yergin’s commanding heights are controlled by capitalist nations.
Yet the fear that the armies of controlled economies are on the march still haunts many business people, who should know better. There is plenty of irony to go around in this fight against nothing.
Health care is the Trojan horse of those who see the enemies of capitalism on the march. Ironically, it is the Chamber which has called for manufacturers to be saved from the burden of health care. It has also called for normalization of relations with Cuba and a national gasoline tax.
Capitalism is not in danger. Even Britain’s venerable Labor Party had shed most of its socialist principles to compete and win under Tony Blair. The great writer H.G.Wells, one of the fathers of science fiction (“War of the Worlds”), predicted that socialism would defeat capitalism because it was a system and capitalism was not.
Wells had it exactly wrong. Capitalism is a dynamic system and socialism or its extreme, communism, is not. –For North Star Writers Group
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Public Faces, Scowls or Smiles?
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France is wiping its public face. Maybe you don’t think it needed it but the French do, and they have committed a chunk of their economic stimulus package to refreshing public buildings and historical treasures. The royal palaces of Fontainebleau and Versailles near Paris, and the many chateaus down the Loire River will benefit.
To the casual eye, these monuments, these aspects of the public face of France, looked in pretty good shape. But when this latest effort is finished, they should be as great as they were hundreds of years ago.
By contrast, the economic slump has forced U.S. jurisdictions to cut back on their expenditures for the public face of America. Those who had hoped that the stimulus package would revive the New Deal-era Works Projects Administration are disappointed. Federal and state governments are slashing funding for public works projects and letting public places decay.
Virginia is even closing some of the rest areas on its Interstates. These are not especially plentiful, but they are a godsend for truckers and people traveling with children and pets. They offer no food but they do offer clean toilets and, thoughtfully, an area for dogs to do what dogs do. No luxuries, just necessities.
France is not alone in thinking it must keep its public face clean and smiling. Allegedly, staid Britain works hard on its public face. For example the Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has promised that the double-decker London buses will not be phased out as his predecessor, Socialist Ken Livingstone, had tried to do.
Livingstone wanted all the city’s familiar red buses replaced with so-called bendy buses (articulated buses). On the face of it, the old buses are uneconomic; they take a crew of two, whereas the bendy buses only have a driver. Yet that first economic calculation does not tell the whole story: Johnson sees the double-decker buses as being an integral part of the public face of London.
Likewise, the black taxis of London. They are unique to London and they cost more than regular cars because they are purpose-built, and new designs are introduced every few years. Often modified, new design-taxis are built by different companies: Some are built by companies that are not otherwise in the automobile business. This procurement pattern keeps the innovations coming.
While it costs Londoners more for their buses and their taxis, it comforts them in a way; it makes them feel special. But the real dividends are in tourism: London is the most visited city in Europe.
Paris and Rome each have a high sense of their public face and a regard for the aesthetic sensibilities of the population. Also, they have a certain knowledge that that a smiling public face will bring the smiling tourist faces, clutching their dollars, yen and yuan.
At bottom, it may be more of a philosophical issue than an economic one. Half a century ago, Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the “private affluence” and “public squalor” in the United States.
Not that there are no great public places in the United States: New York’s Central Park holds its own against London’s Hyde Park or Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Nonetheless, it would have been nice if there were stimulus money to spruce them up and maybe create a great new public toy, like London’s giant Ferris wheel, The Eye. Churchill said that we shape buildings and then they shape us. Quite so. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Power Lunches, Then and Now
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Despite Jimmy Carter, lunch is alive and well in Washington. But it is a different rite than it was before his presidency.
Carter was the president who launched an attack on the notorious three-martini lunch. He not only scorned the business lunch culture, but he also changed the tax law so that only half the cost of a business lunch can now be deducted.
Carter became a dirty word in the restaurants of Washington. Yet the change in lunch habits may have occurred anyway.
During the Carter years, drinking at lunch slowed to a stop. There is hardly any drinking at lunch these days: Headwaiters proffer wine lists to shaking heads.
It was not Carter’s jiggling the tax code that killed the three-martini lunch, but rather a great social change that coincided with his time in Washington. For complex reasons, the decision-makers of the big cities dried out in the 1970s. My guess is that the world became more competitive, secretaries were not prepared to cover for their intoxicated bosses, drunk-driving laws tightened and health became an issue.
For me, the old-time Washington lunch was exemplified by a wonderful man, a great friend and a tremendous lobbyist. His name was Tom Clark and he represented the nuclear interests of the General Electric Company in Washington. Clark—who, alas, died more than two decades ago–was the uncontested master of the Washington lunch. And, yes, he drank three martinis with his lunch every day.
Clark was an American patrician, a kind of nobleman. He was also marvelous company and a skilled lobbyist. His principal tool was lunch, but he did not roam from restaurant to restaurant. He ate his lunch every day at Le Provencal, a classic French restaurant, where he always sat at the same large, round table.
Clark’s guests were a who’s who of Washington movers and shakers. There would be a Cabinet secretary at his table, maybe a senator and often a House member. I was one of the regulars at his round table. As a reporter, these feasts were valuable but mostly fun. You could drink anything you liked so long as it was distilled, fermented or brewed. There was a large menu, but most of Clark’s guests followed his lead and ordered grilled Dover sole.
Well, there are no more long, three-martini lunches and grilled Dover sole has given way to a new kind of eating: stacked, fusion food favored by the dieting classes in Washington. Of course without alcohol, three-hour lunches are out. Now we choke down the ersatz food with bottled water, ice tea or diet soda. Tom Clark would not have approved.
It is the shorter lunch that has allowed the development of that gastronomic and political horror: the power breakfast. All over Washington power-brokers are breakfasting with people from Capitol Hill, the media and the political financiers, who are the kingmakers.
Eating around Washington is really not about deals and arm-twisting, but rather about opening and keeping open channels of communication that later might be used to push a lobbying message. In the days when the martini ruled, it was a bit about communications, but mostly it was fun. It was just that it was more productive to have fun with a Cabinet member or an important senator than, well, your neighbor.
In the old days, the greatest lunch place in Washington was another French restaurant: Sans Souci. Its headwaiter, Paul, was known for his prodigious recall of names. You had to fight for a reservation and fight to be seated at a good table. The most important table–in a restaurant that was fairly small and had terraces of tables–was the Kennedy table. At this table, Kennedy family members dined with their White House and media friends. Columnist Art Buchwald was often seen with Ethel Kennedy. A cheery hail from that table as you passed by and you were on the A-list.
Today, there is nothing that looks like an A-list in Washington, and no restaurant dominates political and media circles. Also since the Carter presidency, White House staffers have favored the White House mess over restaurants.
Only retired people dare quaff midday martinis these days. As Rudyard Kipling noted, “There’s sore decline in Adam’s line.” –For North Star Writers Group
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