Kerby Anderson
The latest information from the World Economic Forum shows that the Davos crowd wants you to give up your car. Tucked inside a briefing paper is a plan to reduce the number of cars around the world by 75 percent.
The title of the paper is: “The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility.” It begins with the prediction that more than two-thirds of the world’s population will be urban by 2050. The paper argues that the only way to achieve the climate goals of the Paris Agreement is to push for “electrification, public transport, and shared mobility.”
That means fewer cars. The goal is to reduce the number of vehicles from 2.1 billion to 0.5 billion in less than 30 years. This would be one way to slash emissions from passenger vehicles. I have another suggestion on how to slash emissions. We can restrict participants at World Economic Forum events from flying in private jets that have a significant carbon footprint.
Let me ask you a question. Do you like owning a car? It gives you much greater mobility than mass transportation. In fact, you may live in an area that has inadequate mass transportation.
The push toward more electric cars assumes that states are producing enough additional electricity for those electric cars. How is your state doing these days in producing enough electricity to cool your home? Do you think it will be able to produce enough additional electricity to power more electric cars on the road?
Reducing the number of cars will require massive central planning. I’m not sure too many Americas are ready for politicians and bureaucrats to control their lives in this way.

Kerby Anderson
Today is the 4th of July, and I thought I would take a moment to talk about the origin of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson said that many of the ideas in the Declaration came from John Locke. Jefferson also gave credit to the writer Algernon Sidney, who in turn cites most prominently Aristotle, Plato, Roman republican writers, and the Old Testament.
Legal scholar Gary Amos argues that Locke’s Two Treatises on Government is simply Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex in a popularized form. Amos says in his book Defending the Declaration “that the ‘law of nature’ is God’s general revelation of law in creation, which God also supernaturally writes on the hearts of men.”
This foundation helps explain the tempered nature of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was a bold document, but not a radical one. The colonists did not break with England for “light and transient causes.” They were mindful that Romans 13 says they should be “in subjection to the governing authorities” which “are established by God.” Yet when they suffered from a “long train of abuses and usurpations,” they argued that “it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government.”
Jefferson also drew from George Mason’s Declaration of Rights (published on June 6, 1776). The first paragraph states that “all men are born equally free and independent and have certain inherent natural Rights; among which are the Enjoyment of Life and Liberty, with the Means of Acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining Happiness and Safety.”
The Declaration of Independence is more than 200 years old. It was a monumental document at the time. Even today its words ring with truth and inspire new generations.