Conclusions:

  • Just as millions of jobs were created digitizing communications, millions will be created digitizing mobility. A wave of innovation has already passed its tipping point.
  • A draft ordinance is provided for City and State governments to exercise their sovereignty over “internal improvements” to convert traffic costs into jobs and capture the economic opportunities coming from self-driving cars, JPods, and Hyperloops.
  • Oil-wars caused me to hunt their Root Cause and discover the Framers had forbidden it.

Root Cause of Oil-wars:

Eight US Presidents identified foreign oil addiction as a grave threat to national security, Examples:

  • 1974 Richard Nixon: “At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need. We will hold our future in our hands alone.”
  • President W. Bush, 2006, “Keeping American competitive requires affordable energy. Here we have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.”
  • President Obama, 2010, "For decades we have known that the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered..."

American soldiers are buying time with blood for the nation to answer these Presidential calls to action in perpetual oil-wars since 1991.

Yet, nothing has changed. Currently, in 2020, the US imports 1/3rd of the oil we use. Oil-dollars fund friends, enemies, and terrorists alike. We borrow the funds to buy that oil and defend access to it with debt, thereby mortgaging the future labor of children.

Why have we repeatedly traveled this path to war? Why repeat a mistake for half a century? US Peak Oil was in 1970.

Answer:

The root cause of oil-wars is the unconstitutional Federal highway monopoly. 

Twenty-two years ago, I did not have a clear understanding of the grave defects of the Federal highway system, nor that we had alternatives. Like most Americans, I loved my car and the Interstates. 

War, terrorism, and a West Point education forced me to seek technologies to end perpetual oil wars. I invented and patented JPods solar-powered mobility networks to combine the 400+ ton-mpg efficiency of freight railroads with the on-demand service of the Internet, the Physical Internet®. US Patent 6,810,8187:

  • Networks of self-driving cars: #1 “A method of controlling a transportation System for moving people, freight, and any combination thereof, using a distributed network of intelligent devices without requiring the aid of a human driver.”
  • Solar-powered mobility networks: #10 “The method...providing...Solar and wind power generators integrated into the physical Structure of Said transportation System...”

Trying to implement this patent collided with the Federal highway monopoly, forcing a deep study in the nature of liberty, governments, and democracy. It amazed me that the Framers specifically addressed this issue in the US Constitution’s Divided Sovereignty, which is the subject of this paper.

Liberty is required to innovate. The mission of the Federal government is to defend liberty. 

Liberty:

Two aspects of Liberty intertwined to create the “general welfare”:

  1. Society’s tolerance of disruptive minorities offering choices. There are few minorities as tiny and disruptive as inventors. If I am successful, I will change America’s economic lifeblood from oil to ingenuity. It will be very disruptive.
  2. Society’s tolerance for people sorting those choices in a Darwinian crucible of free speech and free markets, the Wisdom of the Many.

Nature of Governments:

Who eats lunch and who is lunch illustrates the violent nature of life. 

We need governments to minimize violence from wars and crimes by coercing compliance with laws. Sovereignty is the monopoly of violence we grant governments to punish. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense states the founding generation’s understanding of this role of government:

“SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”

Governments coerce compliance. Innovation is a compliance failure. 

Coercion by government monopolies versus the liberty to innovate is illustrated in the shift from a near-century of rotary telephones to the Internet (monopoly created Aug. 1, 1918):

  • Liberty was restored in 1982 when courts declared the Federal communications monopoly unconstitutional. Long dormant technologies then commercialized.
  • Cell phones were available in 1973.
  • The 1968 Mother of All Demos showed most aspects of the Internet and modern computing from video conferencing, clicking on a URL, and even using a mouse.
  • The technology behind BlueTooth and WiFi was patented in 1941. 
  • In 1926 Nickola Tesla noted in a Collier magazine interview 

"When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, ...We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket."

There is no technical barrier to radically safer and more efficient transportation. Billionaires, Musk and Branson, are violating every law that gets in their way. Tesla has provided 3 billion self-driving miles on roads with a 9-times better safety record. Hyperloop has carried its first passengers. Ending oil-wars and allowing working-class Americans to innovate requires ending unconstitutional Federal monopolies. The digitizing of mobility has already passed its tipping point with massive economic opportunities in converting America’s $1.7 trillion/year traffic costs into value.

Published 45 years ago, Congressional study PB-244854, “Automated Guideway Transit” concludes that Federal regulations prevented transportation innovation for “four to six decades.” It cites the Morgantown PRT, a network of grade-separated self-driving cars as the solution. We had the solution to urban traffic for half a century, yet Federal monopolies ignore Presidents and mandate wars.

The Framers understood this coercion versus liberty.

The Boston Tea Party was a demonstration against a government transportation monopoly that triggered a war. To prevent rebuilding that path to war (and the current path to perpetual oil-wars), States voted 8 to 3 on Sept. 14, 1787, for the Constitution to forbid Federal taxing to build “highways and canals.” This is specifically documented in the “post Roads” and “Ports” restrictions in Article 1. It is generally stated in the Preamble’s Divided Sovereignty.

Most Americans love Interstate highways. This majority affection for something that created perpetual war forced me to study the nature of democracy.

Democracy:

Democracy has two facets - one brilliant and one vile:

  • Brilliant is the Wisdom of the Many. The aggregated wisdom of all of us, with each of us acting in our own self-interest, is wiser than the wisest of us at choosing between choices.
  • Vile is Tyranny of the Majority. The Framers experienced “Taxation without Representation” in the Revolution, the period of “wild democracy” between the Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution and their holding of slaves:

Benjamin Franklin: "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"

John Adams: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

John Quincy Adams: "Democracy has no forefathers, it looks to no posterity ; it is swallowed up in the present, and thinks of nothing but itself."

Divided Sovereignty, Making Democracy Safe to Handle:

The Constitution’s Preamble, the Federal mission statement, clearly Divided Sovereignty:

  • The Federal government is granted unlimited powers for its limited monopoly of violence over issues of war, to “provide” for the defense of liberty for ourselves and our Posterity.
  • The Federal government is prohibited to only “promote the general welfare” with:
    • States sovereign over issues of crimes and commercial disputes.
    • The people over all liberties not enumerated as sacrificed in written Constitutions.

The Divided Sovereignty of the Preamble is restated in Amendments 9 and 10 of the Bill of Rights:

Amendment 9: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment 10: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

This Divided Sovereignty is explained in:

Federalist #28 (Hamilton): 

“Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government. The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress. How wise will it be in them by cherishing the union to preserve to themselves an advantage which can never be too highly prized!” [The People found it necessary to have two types of governments so we can use one to wage war on the abuses of the other, Revolution and Civil Wars.]

Federalist #46 (Madison): 

“The federal and State governments are in fact but different agents and trustees of the people, constituted with different powers, and designed for different purposes.”

Federalist #45 (Madison):

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State."

States are sovereign over “internal improvements,” highways, and other aspects of commercial self-interest. Oil-wars are a consequence of mixing Federal war-powers with the commercial self-interest of government monopolies.  

Why the Framers Divided Sovereignty to create a compound republic is explained in Federalist #9, #10, #28, #39, and others. On suppressing Tyranny of the Majority from Federalist #10 (Madison): 

“AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction (Democracy’s Tyranny of the Majority)... 

Pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic,--is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it. … The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.” 

Thomas Jefferson’s Feb. 2, 1816 letter to Joseph Cabell summaries the success of the 62-year effort (from 1754 to 1816) in implementing "wise and frugal Government":

“No, my friend, the way to have a good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward directs the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body...”

Internal Improvements and the Path to Perpetual Oil-Wars:

Paths to war require decades to build. Steps are incrementally unnoticeable until an attack like 9/11 surprises us. The steps to 9/11 began in 1913 with the 17th Amendment (popular election of Senators). It reduced the cost of political corruption from buying half a state legislature to merely contributing to a Senate campaign. Without states being represented in the Senate, the Amendment 10 and Divided Sovereignty became paper barriers as America shifted from a compound republic to a democracy. 

By 1916, enough influence had been purchased by auto and oil interests for Congress to disregard the clear text of the Constitution and the 21 Presidential veto messages enforcing the “post Roads” restriction to pass The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1916. 

A “needful” majority addicted to cheap oil grew in strength with Federal consolidation, the diminishing of State sovereignty, and the denial of liberty to innovate. As noted in Federalist #10, in a democracy “there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party.” The weaker party is children:

  • Debt is the tax on future labor. $27 trillion, or $82,418 per child (2020 -11-13), is a tax imposed on the future labor of children without their consent. This is Taxation without Representation. By their nature, children are incompetent to defend themselves.
  • Resource depletion. Life requires energy. Oil is depleting. Less energy, less life. US Peak Oil was in 1970. The Federal highway monopoly binding Posterity to depleting oil energy depletes liberty for Posterity.
  • Foreign oil addiction and perpetual oil-wars. To sustain the Federal highway monopoly, a path to perpetual oil-wars is mandated for our children to face.

Solution:

I would like to see the 17th Amendment repealed and the Divided Sovereignty of the 9th and 10th Amendments enforced, but that will take time. 

To speed the ending of oil-wars, the Solar Mobility Ordinance was drafted for cities and states to adopt. 

Summary: Privately funded networks 5-times more efficient than roads pay 5% of gross revenues and are automatically approved unless rejected in writing within 45 days of plan submission. This changes the role of governments:

  • From approving innovation (contrary to their nature, note the “decades” of bureaucratic delays noted in Congressional Study PB-244854 above),
  • To rejecting innovations (coercion is their nature).

////////////   BEGIN 5X5 Standard of the Solar Mobility Ordinance ////////////

WHEREAS,

  1. Mobility is the physical aspect of liberty and should not be contained by government monopolies; and,
  2. The Oklahoma Constitution mandates free markets and forbids government monopolies, Article II, Bill of Rights, SECTION II-32. "Perpetuities and monopolies are contrary to the genius of a free government, and shall never be allowed, nor shall the law of primogeniture or entailments ever be in force in this State;" and,
  3. The Boston Tea Party was a demonstration against a government transportation monopoly that triggered a war and caused the "post Roads" and "Ports" restrictions to be added to the US Constitution, forbidding Federal taxing to build "highways and canals"; and,
  4. Twenty-one Presidential veto messages enforced clear text of the Constitution's "post Roads" restriction; and,
  5. Federalist #45 documents the intent of the US Constitution's Divided Sovereignty, Federal over issues of war and States for issues of commerce and "internal improvements"; and,
  6. Since the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1916 shifted sovereignty from the states to the Federal government:
    • Political influence replaced efficiency as a driving factor, metric: 46% of 400+ ton-mpg freight railroads have been replaced by 25 mpg roads.
    • Innovation was frozen for "four to six decades aside from some relatively minor cosmetic changes" as documented by Congressional Study PB-244854; and,
  7. Violations of the Constitution resulted in government transportation monopolies that mandate foreign oil addiction, cited by eight US Presidents as a grave threat to national security; and,
  8. Foreign oil addiction resulted in perpetual oil-wars since 1991, oil-dollar funded terrorism, national debt increasing in tandem with foreign oil imports, Climate Change, and other risks to national security.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, To encourage economic development and transportation innovation, the ___CITY__or__STATE___ shall regulate grade-separated networks of self-driving vehicles by the following 5X5 Standard:

  1. Network construction must be privately funded. [[place risk on innovators, not taxpayers]]
  2. Networks must exceed 5 times the efficiency on existing roads (125 mpg or equivalent energy efficiency). [[metric driven]]
  3. Networks meeting the 5X efficiency standard are automatically approved unless rejected in writing, for any reason whatsoever, within 45 days of plan submission. [[remove bureaucratic delays and allow governments to enforce public interests]]
  4. Pay 5 percent of the gross transportation revenues to the aggregate rights-of-way holders. [[compensate the taxpayers for Rights of Way use]]
  5. Operate without government subsidies. [[place risk on innovators, not taxpayers]]
  6. Exceed safety performance of transportation modes already approved for use. [[improve safety]]
  7. Obtain Rights of Way access using the existing Rights of Way policies. [[existing for telecommunications and energy]]
  8. Are designed, fabricated, installed, insured, and inspected in compliance with International, ASTM International F24 standards for Amusement Rides and Devices (Disney monorail standard, Oklahoma Department of Labor). [[existing regulations, existing enforcement, existing common law, existing safety record 10,000 times better than roads (0.9 injuries per million versus 11,200 injuries per million on roads]]
  9. Gather more than 2 megawatt-hours of renewable energy per network mile per typical day. [[sustainable energy supply]]

//////////////////   END ////////////////////