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July 8, 2009 (LPAC)—If you think your driving costs are too high now, get ready to really pay through the nose. Plans are under way to charge you by the mile driven, a scheme which necessarily involves tracking your every move. This plan is where the green agenda of the behaviorist fascists meets Big Brother, in an orgy of social control. Like all such schemes, it was developed in the bowels of the British Empire, tested in England, and is now being imposed upon the United States.

The details are laid out in a report by the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission released earlier this year, entitled "Paying Our Way / A New Framework for Transportation Finance." The theme of the report is that "Our system is underpriced," and that "users and direct beneficiaries" should "bear the full costs of using the transportation system." The NSTIFC, a commission created by Congress, asserts that the current system of fuel taxes "provides users with only weak price signals... users do not bear anywhere near the full costs of their travel; and fuel taxes have no direct link to specific parts of the system being used or to times of the day and thus cannot be used to affect these kinds of traveler choices."

Therefore, the commission recommends "more direct forms of 'user pay' charges, in the form of a charge for each mile driven (commonly referred to as a vehicle miles traveled, or VMT fee system)... as the consensus choice for the future." Furthermore, this VMT system should provide "a foundation for state and local governments that choose to use it to develop their own mileage-based systems that piggyback on the Federal system in order to raise their share of needed revenues in ways that spur more efficient use of the system." The technology deployed should be designed "in anticipation of the potential for state, local, and private toll roads [!] to piggyback on the national system," the report added. The commission also recommends "actions to facilitate and encourage private-sector financial participation," as "private capital can help deliver more projects and thus play a role in helping to address the investment gap." It also recommends that all such fees be indexed to inflation, so that they will rise automatically.

The report is stunning, in both its fascist mind-set and its economic incompetence, reflecting an abysmal lack of understanding of the role of infrastructure in promoting economic progress, and an intent to impose Big Brother-style surveillance measures upon the population. Rather than simply raising the gasoline tax, which would be the most efficient method for collecting more revenue, the commission proposes instead the creation of an entirely new, and tremendously intrusive and expensive, system of tracking the movement of every vehicle, and using that movement to calculate taxes. These new fees would use the behaviorists' pleasure/pain methods to punish drivers for driving in rush hour, or driving on congested roads, or driving cars with poor gas mileage.

From an economic standpoint, this scheme would be a disaster. Transportation systems are not profit centers to be milked for cash, but part of the general infrastructure which promotes economic activity. As such, the goal should be to make transportation ever cheaper, and more efficient, with the costs paid out of the increased economic productivity such transportation helps spur. Rather than going to onerous VMT and toll systems, we should launch an emergency drive to implement high-speed mag-lev rail systems, to reduce congestion, reduce travel times, and increase efficiency. The fees for such a system should be kept to a minimum, to encourage usage, with its consequent boost to the economy. Scientific and technological progress, not fascist social control, is the solution to our problems.

johnhoefle@larouchepub.com