The Inalienable Right to Drive
 

Georgia state Rep. Bobby Franklin, R-Marietta, has introduced a bill that would do away with drivers' licenses, arguing that they “are a throw back to oppressive times.”

In his bill, Franklin states, "free people have a common law and constitutional right to travel on the roads and highways that are provided by their government for that purpose. Licensing of drivers cannot be required of free people, because taking on the restrictions of a license requires the surrender of an inalienable right."

Well, we bicyclists have been saying all along that we have a right to travel on the road. ;)

I appreciate the right being recognized, I dont want people with even less education driving.

Is he on f***ng drugs?!? :eek: Since when driving is a "right"?!? WHY DO WE HAVE RET**DS FOR POLITICIANS?!?!

"Driving is a privilege, not a right"

...this was repeated to me about 1000 times before I was able to get a license.

Cause we elected them... LOL.

Truthfully, driver's liceses hardly mean anything anymore. The driver's ed classes are a joke, and there are people driving around with licenses they got 60 years ago, before most of the current traffic laws were written.

I think they should make it even harder to get a license. They should re-test every year, they should limit the max speed of your car based on your driving skill and car's condition (like they do in Germany) and they should be able to revoke someone's license indefinitely if they abuse it.

+1

I agree with the sentiment of the representative but the implementation would be difficult. If there were a way to identify the people with drunk driving convictions and keep them off the roads permanently then I'd be for his bill. If there were stringent testing and standards in place that would take into account elderly people, crazy people, epileptics and people with other medical conditions, then such a system might be able to work.

Everybody would need to carry an identification card. There would be no prohibitions for letting citizens drive and no regular license renewals. Upon being convicted of an offense the courts could require the stamping of the ID with whatever restrictions were necessary according to the offense. If the person was caught breaking the law or not obeying the restrictions such person would face arrest and jail.

As it is now drunk drivers usually continue doing it even after their first conviction. The ID system wouldn't be any different. It would just eliminate the licensing process. The drunks would again be caught and brought before a judge. Until they are taken off the road for the first conviction and jailed for the second I see no change in this area of driving.

Recently I got a commercial driver license. The DMV testing was on a computer and driving around. I can parallel park a bus. My company only required fifteen hours of behind the wheel training but I got one week. I completed over seventy hours of in class training. With so little on road experience I was let loose driving a bus load of passengers. I'm still learning and improving but I was allowed on the roads.

People are allowed to drive cars with very little training. It's amazing that there aren't more crashes.

If you every run into a bunch of people who've lost their license due to drunk driving, you'll see that people believe they have an "inalienable" right to drive.

God, maybe it's times for the alien invasion.

Aliens are most likely not interested. I bet there are better planets to invade, with intelligent lifeforms on them...

I was talking with a friend recently about flying cars. They were supposed to be here by now. Every now and then you hear that some company has a prototype and it may happen soon. My friend pointed out that to operate one of those you would basically need a simple version of a pilots license with training. This would actually make driving (at least the flying cars) limited only to those smart enough to get the pilots license. Everyone else would use the mass transit piloted by someone with the license.

At least then if you were driving a flying car, you would know that most the people flying one near you had to be at least smarter than the people driving regular cars.

You know, I can get behind the idea that we all have a right to travel on the roads. Operating a motor vehicle on said roads is an entirely different issue.

Stevie wonder is gonna love that law! Too bad we won't!

... coarse language

Will the state be covering your insurance bill?

This is a ridiculous grab for some extended attention by a career politician who knows damn well his proposal is going to be tabled. Takes up the taxpayers' valuabletime/money w/this stupidity. Why don't these people work on meaningful legislative issues pertaining to their local district? One hopes this idiot is at the state level and not actually in Congress. :rolleyes:

But, then again as stated many times here on BF 26th District NY State Representative Christopher Lee shows us all: This thread's no good without pictures! :love:

+1000

Showboating for a stupid constituency.

+1

Not that we know of.

That may be because we're not intelligent enough to find them :D Spending most of our resources on weapons and killing each other and destroying our own planet rather than on peaceful research and advancement probably puts us outside of the definition of "intelligent life".

I know this is getting off topic but this sub topic is really interesting too. I'll mention bikes to keep it relevant by saying that it would be interesting if aliens had all their superior knowledge and technology but did so without ever going the route of the wheel. They may find our bikes to be the most interesting thing they have ever found in the universe!

Back to the subtopic at hand: finding them or them finding us may be futile. Someone once framed it by asking what if a blind cave fish ever wanted to find the mythical human and make contact. Generations ago another fish swears he heard human voices in the cave. They feel like they are making progress and they may make contact any day now. They wonder why we haven't made contact with them yet.

We, like the blind cave fish, may be waiting a long time for first contact.

It's starting to look like planets are extremely common in our galaxy. Since we've seen no evidence of other intelligent life, the Drake equation would seem to suggest that the average lifetime of technological civilizations is much shorter than we'd like it to be. They might either destroy themselves or run out of resources -- we've gone far enough down that path so we can see how that scenario might play out.

But since distances are measured in tens and hundreds of light years it's very hard to knock on the neighbor's door. We might eventually receive radio signals from a civilization only to find out that it's long gone since it took a few hundred years for the signal to reach us.

And seriously, we waste too much resources on wars to have any real chance to break away from our solar system. Until the planet unifies and ends wars the progress of individual nations will remain too slow to enable space exploration on a large scale.

I mean, NASA is back to rockets and parachutes from space shuttles. And until we burn chemicals we won't get anywhere anyway. Nations would have to put togehether all they have to have a shot at developing meaningful propulsion technology and spacecraft capable of carrying a large number of people and cargo across significant distances. And even that will require gazillion of other accompanying technologies to make the space travel possible: materials, life support systems, communication, navigation, energy storage and conservation, food processing and storage, health and emergency medicine, psychology, etc. None of these are at the level that will enable a large crew to travel across interplanetary space. Sending 4 people on a 4-year trip in a 10' wide can, hoping they won't freak out and eat one another, to bring back some rocks from Mars is not "space exploration".

Exactly so. It's not for lack of know-how or ideas. They could do better if they had the resources. But they don't.

Interesting. And I have no argument for any of the above opinions. My point was that if they are far enough ahead of us in intelligence, then an attempt at contact (from either side) won't do any good. It would be like us trying to make contact with a cockroach.

Well it's yes and no about space exploration and warfare. The original impetus for the space programs was warfare. The German V2 was the granddaddy of both the American and Russian big rockets, and both space programs were cold-war programs. But it was Johnson who de-emphasized space, to help pay for the Vietnam war, allowing the Apollo program to wind down during Nixon's term.

Searching for life is a stupid reason to go into space. And I agree with Stephen Hawking, that we don't really want to go advertising ourselves because anyone who comes looking is likely to be more advanced than ourselves, but probably not so advanced that they have evolved beyond war. (Of course we have been broadcasting radio and TV for over a century and the cat is out of the bag) So as musikguy notes, it's wise for us cockroaches to avoid looking for trouble.

Though I think that by the time we do meet other intelligent life, we will be ready. Michael Alcubierre has already come up with an idea that should make faster than light travel possible. That's kind of like Da Vinci's drawings of a bicycle. On the right path, but still far from feasible. If we don't kill ourselves, an amazing future awaits.

It's demand for resources that will propel us into space. Right now the only ones we can tap are communication, looking at the Earth to understand it better, looking at the Sun to understand why it does what it does and giving Billionaires something new to spend their Billions on and play one upsmanship. All good causes.

The trick is to get the few people we send up, to have a substantial ROI, send goodies back to Earth and have babies so we don't have to send more people into space. Once people are in space, delivering goods back to Earth is easy.

I think that inhabiting the Moon will be the next phase of the space race. Again, China, India, Japan, Europe and hopefully the U.S. will be there. As Robert Heinlein demonstrated, militarily, the Moon is the most powerful place on Earth.

But I suspect the winner in this race will not be any particular country, but rather a current underdog; the corporations. They are already winning really. They own the communications satellites and the tourist buses. They are going after the low hanging fruit. It is much like the U.S. whaling industry which quickly went from rescuing carcasses on New England beaches to spanning the globe in the search for whale oil. I don't think we've found the "gold" yet that will spark the rush. But I have faith that we will.

I am sometimes convinced that the cockroaches are a higher form of life that most people give them credit for!

Aaron :)

God must love them, as he's kept them around for so long. :lol: