Conservative Social Engineering

George Will launches a magnificently mad rant against high-speed rail:

. . . the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.

This tirade explains much of the conservative anti-freedom agenda. Why do the supposed friends of liberty support zoning rules that require large house lots, minimum numbers of parking spaces at all businesses, wide streets, and the other impedimenta of modern suburbs? Why does the pro-business party fight the right of businessmen to build apartment buildings and even townhouses? Will lets out their secret: they are engaged in a vast project of social engineering, designed to turn all Americans into Republicans. If people drive everywhere and live on such big lots that they never have to see their neighbors, they will fall for the illusion that they "stand on their own two feet." They will come to feel that they need no help from the government or anyone else, that all regulations are intrusions into their god-given freedom, and that all the buying power represented by their paychecks is "their money" that nobody should take away.

But these things are illusions. We, unsupervised, untutored, unscripted, are not the masters of our fates. Most of what constitutes our fates is determined by the time and place in which we are born, and the family we are born into. Did you build that car you are freewheeling around in, or invent any of the fifty thousand bits of technical wizardly that make it go? Did you manufacture your own iPod, produce your own electricity, vaccinate yourself against the diseases that used to kill every fourth or fifth child? Somehow I doubt it. We do not stand on our own two feet, but on the vast edifice of our world-spanning civilization.