> My understanding is that no such process ever took place: government bureaucrats decided that certain arbitrary rules were appropriate and that anyone who violated them should be punished, based on whatever information they considered relevant, and imposed them by fiat.
... that's the process I was talking about. Bureaucrats making rules and then seeing if voters reject them by electing people to make different rules is how things work in a representative democracy.
You seem to dislike a lot of the rules and incentives in the space, and I'm sure I agree with you on a lot of the details, but none of this is going to lead me (or many other people) to a categorical "license plates are bad" conclusion. I'm very glad we do licensing for cars and drivers, despite the existence of problems on the margins.
> Bureaucrats making rules and then seeing if voters reject them by electing people to make different rules is how things work in a representative democracy.
No, it's not. In an actual representative democracy, the elected representatives write the rules. That's what they're elected to do. And when the US was originally founded, that's what they did.
In what we actually have now, which would be better described as a "bureaucratic oligarchy with a veneer of representative democracy", elected representatives don't even bother to read the umpteen-page laws the bureaucrats write before they vote on them. And no voters have a strong enough incentive to actaully hold the representatives accountable because of the well known problem that doing that requires lots of work and the chance that any particular voter's vote will make a difference is much too small to justify doing all that work. So the only people who actually vote on the substance of issues are those who are driven by ideology or special interests--i.e., those who have other incentives to do all that work and don't care whether their individual vote makes a difference or not.
> I'm very glad we do licensing for cars and drivers
The question is, why? The only argument I've seen made in this thread is "it helps to catch people who violate traffic laws". That's the argument I have been rebutting. Is that the reason you like it?
I ask because there are other arguments for licensing cars and drivers besides that one, but nobody has mentioned them here.
Generally speaking, it is a mechanism that helps enforcement of regulations related to owning and operating a vehicle.
One might agree/disagree with whether or not (or the degree to which) there should be any regulation for owning or operating a vehicle.
If one accepts some form of regulation, then the question becomes whether or not license plates are an effective tool to enable enforcement of said regulation.
I see. What are you trying to accomplish with this debate? Is it to prove to others that you're right, to change their minds, to test your own ideas, or what?
We're way down a pretty irrelevant rabbit hole, but no, the designers of representative governments did not envision that all rulemaking be done by legislative bodies, because that would be completely impractical.
> That's the argument I have been rebutting.
You believe you've been rebutting it, but like I said at the beginning of my comment: I am not persuaded.
... that's the process I was talking about. Bureaucrats making rules and then seeing if voters reject them by electing people to make different rules is how things work in a representative democracy.
You seem to dislike a lot of the rules and incentives in the space, and I'm sure I agree with you on a lot of the details, but none of this is going to lead me (or many other people) to a categorical "license plates are bad" conclusion. I'm very glad we do licensing for cars and drivers, despite the existence of problems on the margins.