No smokies

There was an article that I read just now, and it was linked from a blog that I read sometimes. I want to comment on that article a bit. Actually, I only got a paragraph into the article when it reminded me of something that I've been thinking about lately. That something was the 55 mph speed limit imposed during the Energy Crisis of the early 1970's.

The said article asserted that we cannot "obey our way back to normalcy". Indeed! This was in response to the latest call for more lockdowns and such in response to the covid fake "pandemic".

There are some similarities between the two eras. The Energy Crisis days were the days when Big Government was trying to put an end to Big Oil. Big Oil was supposed to be at the root of our troubles, but as Ronald Reagan said at the time--Big Government wasn't the solution, it was the problem.

The people back then didn't obey quite so much either. The 55 mph speed limit started its own movement in the culture. The movement was resistance to the overly restrictive speed limit. Movies were made about it. The one that may be the most memorable was "Smokey and The Bandit".

It wasn't framed that way, but it was civil disobedience to the 55 mph speed limit. For anybody not familiar, the plot revolved around "The Bandit" getting past the determined "Smokey", who was trying to jail him for driving too fast. The Bandit got away, and the The Smokey was left with a police car reduced to junk in his quest to catch up and jail the Bandit.

One scene that I remember is seeing the price of gasoline back then. It seemed high at the time, but it seems really low now, about 50 cents a gallon.

It was all about evading the law, which was erroneously enforcing an unnecessary law, which was intended to solve a problem that did not exist. There was no Energy Crisis. It was a Government Crisis, but it didn't get promoted that way. It took Reagan to end the miscalled Energy Crisis, which was solved by getting the government out of the oil business.

If we can get Big Government out of our business, I think we'll all be a lot better off. It happened before, so let us hope that we can make it happen again. The alternative isn't a pretty one.