The Orange Grove: Public matters least in traffic snarls

I travel quite a lot. I have crossed the United States by car about 25 times and have also done a good deal of driving in Europe.

Some time ago, I noticed something that one might wish to explore more systematically, which is that, in much of Europe, the authorities matter most, with the public waiting its turn. Twenty years ago I wrote about this in a column and it was all reconfirmed for me during a recent 500-mile trip on Germany'sAutobahn.

I noticed that, whenever some mishap happens on the road, the authorities shut it all down, even if it is just a spilled crate of apples. I was driving north on A2 when, suddenly, everything came to a screeching halt. Nothing moved. It was like a huge parking lot. Everyone stood there, with cars idling, using up precious fuel in the scorching heat, air conditioning blasting in every car that had it. To be sure, there were radio announcements telling us that matters had gone awry but this didn't help much.

There were two or three of these interruptions within a span of about 300 miles, with one delay lasting an entire hour. And when it was over, and we drove past the "accident," it looked like a small van turned over, and some boxes had spilled out on the road. No ambulance in sight, nada.

At the next rest stop, where everyone opted to use the facilities, I asked people what, exactly, was the big deal. I was informed that the Autobahn people just stop all traffic, no matter the severity of the mishap. Sure, they could have pushed the spilled cargo over to the side of the road and made it possible for traffic to proceed but, no, that would not do. Let's just shut it all down.

I am paranoid enough about public officials to imagine that they just don't give a whit about inconveniencing of the driving public. ("Let them wait. Who cares? They are just subjects, who must submit to the public authorities, are they not?")

Come to think of if, when I originally wrote about this subject I noticed a difference in how the public authorities handled the situation in Europe versus their counterparts in the U.S., but the difference appears to me to have disappeared. Now the same is happening all over the U.S. When a problem arises on a roadway, what seems to matter is what is convenient for the authorities, never mind the driving public.

Maybe I am too suspicious but it looks to me that America is becoming like Europe, not only in its embrace of the welfare state and the entitlement mentality, but also in how the people who supposedly work for us – civil servants – are becoming the wielders of power.

All this reminds me that, for centuries and centuries on end, the bulk of the population everywhere was deemed to be subjects, not citizens, not sovereign individuals. They had no rights, only some privileges granted them by the state. Nothing was done based on what people had coming to them from the public authorities, only as a matter of what the authorities decided the people should be granted, as a gift from the state.

We in America now have a head of state who appears to accept this reactionary philosophy, judging by his eager embrace of the judicial philosophy of Cass Sunstein, Barack Obama's former colleague at the University of Chicago Law School who is now a Harvard law professor. This theorist believes we do not have natural rights, rights prior to the development of a legal system, but that the legal system establishes our rights – meaning he and his pals do.

Not a great development, this Europeanization of America.