Quote:
Originally posted by mikeferg75
Just cause you don't care for it does not mean it is bad for the society as a whole. Your quality of life goes down sure, but you have to realize other people's quality of life goes down in other ways that you maybe think as an imporvment. Like if SUV's were suddenly banned, I like SUVs My quality of life just went down, cause I can't drive one?
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MikeFerg,
I don't entirely disagree with you. In fact if I believed that society on a whole was better off with SUVs than without SUVs I would not be against them.
But this is the way I weigh the issue: on the one hand are SUV owners who get a certain amount of utility and enjoyment out of their SUVs. On other hand are the rest of us (the rest of society) who are put at risk because (1) SUVs pose excessive crash hazzards to non SUVs (2) because SUVs have lower CAFE ratings so they don't have to get very good milate, and (3) they cause pollution and consume limited non-renewable resources.
Now, if the people who owned SUVs had a really good reason to own them, like for example, they lived in an area where they needed to go off road alot, then that would be fine. That's the kind of utility that I think justifies the burden that the SUV places on the rest of society. I have no beef with those people. And for a similar reason I have no trouble with trucks. For the most part people who own trucks get good use out of their trucks, hauling things around. And they couldn't do that in a car.
But the people I live with here in the Bay Area never go off road. Their shiny new Land Rovers and Land Cruisers and Hummers are ding-less and mudless. So as a result these people are taxing society with their waste and their risk (real costs that we have to bear) but they enjoy no offsetting benefit (like the fact that they need to go off road to get to their farm, etc) that justifies the tax that society has to bear.
I concur: interesting discussion.
Douglas