Sugar-Free Marketeers

Splenda/Sucralose

The fantasy of the free marketeers is the fantasy of Splenda. The popular artificial sweetener, said to be 600 times sweeter than table sugar, is made from mixing chlorine with raffinose, a sugar derived from various vegetables. As with saccharine and aspartame, it is often combined with other potions/poisons, in an attempt to cover a soapy aftertaste--sweeteners such as acesulfame-k, salts like sodium ferulate. They never quite work but over time that aftertaste seems natural, and people begin to crave it.

A recent study by the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think-tank, found "Traffic delays will increase 65 percent and the number of congested lane-miles on urban roads will rise by 50 percent over the next 25 years." Fortunately, they say, the solution is cheap. Simply spend $533 billion to widen highways and don't waste any more money on public transit. The author of the study, David T. Hartgen, a Professional Engineer and Professor of Transportation Studies at UNC Charlotte, has done extensive research to show that widening highways is more effective than public transit projects in reducing traffic congestion. Why? Because people love cars and don't use public transit. Of course, he means white middle class people, but still his "reasoning" has a certain space cadet logic. Just like food engineers might achieve the right balance of sweetness by adding a few milligrams here or there of this or that powder, transportation engineers will be able to create a smooth flow of traffic by just adding a few lanes of traffic here and there--and the chemical aftertaste of neocolonialism and dead fish will dissappear.

Iraq is hardly the only place where blood is shed to keep our cars running. In the Niger Delta, 1000 people are killed each year, violence that western oil companies accept as part of doing business in the region, and while the region brings enormous wealth to these companies, most people who live there are destitute.

Meanwhile, a United Nations study found there are now over 150 ocean dead zones, where the lack of oxygen prohibits the survival of fish and other creatures. These zones are created by global warming and land based run off, including tailpipe pollutants, which is why author David Helvarg lists reducing automobile trips as one of the top 50 Ways to Save the Oceans.

Perhaps one should not expect a transportation engineer to care about geopolitics or ocean health, but one should expect an interest in numbers, and there have been numerous studies showing the cost of supporting cars is much higher than the expense of building roads, which are only partially covered by gas tax revenues.

Let's just take the highway patrol for example. The 2006-2007 budget for the California Highway Patrol is over 1.5 billion. Imagine how much more it will be if we simply continue to "accommodate" the growth of automobile usage. But maybe these anti-government activists would prefer we stop funding this bloated institution that restricts our freedom to race the roads, and we could just let the blood spill until highways are covered with a faint pink film, much like the color of my Splenda flavored cherry popsicles.