We live in a nation of laws. Anti-piracy legislation, restrictions on what food can be sold, what substances you can put in your body, how you must build your house (and whom you have to ask permission of to do so), where you can smoke, how old you have to be to drink,...well, the list is endless. And yes, we have laws that govern the air we breathe. As any Californian knows, when it comes time every few years to reregister his car (just another tax, really) he must undergo a smog check.
Now, when they passed the legislation requiring these ridiculous smog checks they made the provision that older cars would be exempt. This ensures that older cars that had no hope of passing the smog checks could still be driven.
...
Did you hear me??? The cars on the road that make the most smog are exempt from the smog check requirement. Is this possibly the least sensical exemption in the history of laws? During prohibition, did we allow for the most alcoholic in the nation to continue to partake? Do we allow serial killers to run rampant since they clearly aren't going to be able to obey that "don't kill" rule?
Lately, the legislature has decided to repeal this exemption, sort of. It makes the rule say that any car made before 1976 is exempt, instead of any car over 30 years old. Car collectors are up in arms about it, and want to stop the addendum to the smog legislation, saying that it will "have an infinitesimal impact on air pollution, and it's going to make a lot of people's lives miserable in the car world..."
Now, first of all, this person is wrong. Older cars currently make a disproportionate amount of smog emissions, and that proportion will accelerate as years go by (RTFA). New cars, which get more expensive each year as the designers work harder to shape up to the new-car emission standards, are getting cleaner and cleaner, and so the incentive to stick with the old car is at least twofold: much less expensive than buying a new clean car (which is expensive due strict emission standards) and no need to fork over the $30+ to get a smog check.
Laws hurt people. A law is, at its heart, a violent action taken by one segment of society (usually the majority) on another. The community states an ideal ("We need clean air! People are having respiratory problems due to smog!") and impose government-enforced requirements on the people. In this case, it hurts most of us, in particular those of us who are already doing a good job keeping the air clean by buying new cars. It hurts us by costing us money which goes in part to the state and to support an industry which by all rights is just a racket. 750 million dollars pours into the smog-check industry coffers annually from Californians, most of them working class people just trying to get to work. This value does not include time lost to do this, either.
Jay Leno and his ilk have it wrong. The addendum is a right step, and the rest of the Smog Check law is bogus. Rather than stopping an additional law to make the former law consistent, he should be trying to get the whole thing pulled in the first place. He has no problem when it hurts the average Californian, but if it annoys a rich collector, there'll be hell to pay.