Legally mandated halfway measures


Why government solutions to "ease the pain" don't usually work
I've just been sorting through my toolbox for my set of metric sockets (don't ask), and I thought it made a perfect example of destroying a good idea by halfway making it law.

Back in the 1970s, some fool legislator had the idea slowly phasing in metric measurements in the United States so people could get used to the idea and to diffuse economic impact. We all know how well that worked.

I can still remember the television spots that taught kids like me that a meter was a little more than a yard.

The point is, given a choice of staying with what they knew AND with no clear advantage, most people stuck with the English standards. Now, this makes us look like we're not eager to accept change.

But back then, the way to listen to portable music was in a brightly colored transistor radio. I remember, I had one, and it was all smooth with rounded corners and in a color that was the first cousin of safety orange.

Since then we have had the Walkman and all the high quality stereo handheld cassette music players.

And then we had the handheld compact disc players.

And now we have MP3 and other digital music formats.

That is three completely separate music formats. Three mutually exclusive formats. More than that if you count each file type of the digital players. All having the same purpose, that is, providing music where ever you go. But each has distinct advantages over it's predecessors. And no one format completely replaced the previous one. Even now, most of my iPod is filled with music I ripped from CDs. And I can still go and buy a transistor radio, a cassette player, or a CD player. Cheap. And the current features will match or beat the features from a top of the line unit from just a few years ago.

People chose to change when they thought it was to their advantage to do so.

Not because they were told to change. Not because some idiot thousands of miles away mandated that they will change for their own good.

But because they could use their own judgment when they could see the benefits AND the costs.

People being responsible and making their own decisions.

What a truly radical idea.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - December 12, 2005 at 07:34 AM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved