"Highway Death Toll Hits All-Time Low" says USA Today for October 27, 1998. United States traffic deaths in 1997 were 41,967; 2.46 million people were injured. This was almost the same as 1996, but the National Highway Safety Administration says that more miles were driven. It gives fatalities for 1996 and 1997 as 1.7 and 1.6 per 100 million miles, respectively.

United States deaths and injuries during the whole of the Vietnam War were 57,700 killed and 153,300 wounded. So, the carnage on our highways is the approximate equivalent of a Vietnam War - every year. Put another way, an American is killed on our highways every 12.5 minutes and a highway injury occurs every 12.8 seconds. (Enviro-caused deaths of children from DDT-preventable malaria in under developed countries occur once every 12 seconds.) Assuming that my six children have life expectancies of about 80 years, there is currently an 8% chance that one of them will be killed in a traffic accident. On average, four of the six children will be injured in a traffic accident at some time in their lives.

The chance that one of my sons will be killed in an auto accident is roughly half the chance that he would have been killed had he served as a combat soldier in Vietnam. Since only men served in Vietnam, the lifetime highway death rates for boys and girls vs. Vietnam soldiers are about equal.

Government is, of course, not interested in individuals. It is interested in the size of the pool of individuals which it controls and the income that it can derive from that pool.

The wonderful safety of our highways is now being trumpeted by federal spokesmen as a "success'' of its "public safety campaigns.''

Does anyone really believe that the vast, tax-financed transportation system of the United States is bringing consumers the safest and most beneficial means of transportation technology available? Who knows what our railroads would have become if they had not been first subsidized and then bludgeoned with regulations and taxes by our government. Automobiles are wonderful, but are a trillion dollars worth of interstate highways really the best way to move them over long distances (as opposed to, for example, flat bed rail cars with passenger accommodations)?

The shapes of our cities have been determined by dead-between-the-ears government planners working hand-in-glove with the tax-financed government transportation monopoly. Then the government complains about smog and blames free enterprise.