There has been a lot of news coverage lately about the new federal mandate that all street signs must adhere to a new federal standard. This new standard effectively obsoletes almost every street sign in the country because it mandates all street signs must now be a particular font, only the first letter may be capitalized and how reflective the sign is now is specified . If you look around you will notice that almost all street signs are capitalized and that is because the old federal mandate said street signs had to be capitalized. So the new federal mandate makes it necessary to replace all the signs designed for the old federal mandate (about 7 years ago). Now adhering to the new federal law will not come cheap, New York City alone estimates 27 million dollars to replace existing signs. Although I did a great deal of research no where could I find an estimate of the total cost of the regulation but it must be in the hundreds of billions country wide.
But the purpose of this blog is not to expound on the insanity of this kind of spending of tax money but to examine just how this law came to be. If there is any example of the slow non stopping creep of federal control into every area of our lives this is it.
Up to about 1927 there was no uniform code for street signs. As you can imagine this led to an array of signage that was confusing. In 1927 the, American Association of State Highway Officials or AASHO began work on a uniform standard for all highway signs. AASHO is an organization of state and local highway officials that set standards for all kinds of transportation issues. In 1935 AASHO released the Manual of Traffic Control Devises (MOTCD) and up until 1966 that defined road signs nationwide. So we basically have a group of local and government officials banding together in a nonprofit organization to standardize street signs.
But the federal government seems to have a need to get involved in everything. In 1966 Congress passed the Highway Safety Act. That act mandated among other things that states develop highway safety programs as well as for the first time regulating the design of street signs. Now the MOTCD is written by the Federal Highway Administration and every few years as the bureaucrats see necessary, this document is updated.
And how would the federal government enforce such a mandate? Why with your tax money of course! The federal government collects taxes from citizens in each state, and then if your state does not do the federal government bidding they withhold sending some of that money back to your state.
So the citizens of a state are obligated by law to provide the federal government with the club that the federal government uses to beat the states into submission.
Once again we have an army of federal bureaucrats setting codes and standards that spend our tax money and control our lives, that army get bigger and bigger unless we say enough.
Today is the 237th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, when "radical" members of a secret organization of American Patriots called Sons of Liberty, boarded three East India Company ships and threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor in protest of unjust taxation and tyranny.
237 years ago the Sons of Liberty said “enough”, when will we?
