The SUV controversy has generated a good deal of passionate rhetoric on both sides of the "debate".

On one side of it there is Mr. Rall, who accuses SUV owners of being "selfish, aggressive louts". Rall cannot seem to help seeing "selfishness" everywhere, even when there is no reason to suspect it or when people's motives are not germane to the problem at hand. It does not occur to him that the SUV owners, no doubt heady with pent-up aggression and gifted with predatory cunning with which they bully, poison, and murder their prey, can easily counterattack and accuse Rall of being, for example, an envious failure who compensates for his own inadequacies by angrily lashing out at the more successful folks with better automobiles. It is doubtful if Rall even has the ability to make a simple T-shirt or to package software that even children and "slaves" possess. It is unclear who, in the resulting shouting match, will be offended more.

In order to estimate the costs and benefits of SUVs, one would have to, at the very least, compare the accident rate, the medical costs, the transportation time, and other variables in a society with widespread ownership of SUVs to their equivalents in a society in which only the ruling elite are allowed to drive these vehicles. This is a non-trivial task that requires a lot more than knowledge of "basic physics". Rall does not cite any study that makes such comparisons, and his argument therefore amounts to pointing out the obvious fact that heavier vehicles are safer to drive but can do more damage during a collision. Yet why is he so sure that the losses "outweigh" the gains?

Further, regardless of the size of one's car, by driving one imposes costs on others human beings. Is there a limit to Rall's calls for driver repression? Once the SUV owners are sent to the Gulag, will minivan owners be next? How small must one's car be in order for its owner to receive Rall's seal of moral approval? He suggests that bicyclists would qualify, yet gives no defense of this arbitrary standard.

Why, in addition, are semi trucks not the objects of Rall's wrath? He would probably answer that trucks serve a social purpose by delivering goods to businesses and customers. SUVs, on the other hand, are tools with which the unkempt boors humiliate the subtle in spirit. This further establishes that Rall's purpose is not to solve this problem of the conflict of interests in such a way that both parties (assuming enough goodwill) are pleased with the outcome, but to condemn one, presumably, "evil" party for its reluctance to surrender unconditionally. He would make a fine advisor to President Bush who also imagines himself to be a some kind of moralist.

It is apparent that Rall has beed tricked by a ubiquitous ruse of the state. By introducing perverse incentives, the latter disrupts human harmony. Instead of recognizing the common enemy and correcting the incentives as much as possible in order to restore the long-run harmony of interests, men like Rall use them as an excuse to turn on each other to satisfy their wrath. Instead of suggesting that roads be privatized in order to create conditions under which entrepreneurs would have the test of profit and loss and the incentives to satisfy the desires of both SUV and car drivers, Rall reflexively takes the side of the "underdog". In so doing he not only conjures up out of nowhere a duty on the part of the SUV owners to "turn [their] SUVs in," but, grotesquely, instructs us to hate them for behavior that may easily be motivated by any number of things other than excessive, from Rall's point of view, competitiveness.

Finally, it is the state's own emission standards that impel manufacturers to make SUVs heavier than they would otherwise be so as to comply with regulations and at the same time to make lighter cars. It is physically impossible to have both lower emissions, greater safety, and comfortable transportation by issuing government decrees. Only under laissez-faire capitalism can producers, with time, improve all the desired parameters with the least amount of effort and waste. Modern cars are quite superior to those produced even thirty years ago in terms of fuel efficiency, safety, power, and comfort. We must not be impatient in wanting more economic and technological progress than can possibly be attained.

Rall may object that, in his opinion, given the current state of affairs, the external benefits of lower pollution to all will be greater than the costs to individual drivers. This merely begs the question: how would he know that? If Rall wants this argument to have a chance of being convincing, then at the very least he should support the devolution of the powers of the federal EPA to the states and localities so as to improve the ability of the citizens to vote for environmental protections "with their feet". Does Rall's faith in the federal government allow him to take such a heretical position?

A sensible position on this issue is that it is not appropriate to blame people for wanting to improve their conditions by using legal means. Rall's only "moral" choices are therefore to advocate privatization of roads or to call for the outlawry of SUVs. Unfortunately, he seems unconcerned either with economics, obedience to the law, and even with avoiding the sins of envy, hatred, and anger. His article illustrates well how the power of ideas can be abused.

March 4, 2003