Let's distinguish training from licensing. Respected instructors in many disciplines will confirm that training is only meaningful if repetitively repeated until it becomes a rote reaction. As such, when confronted with sudden stress, as in an accident, the student will fall back on learned rote behavior rather than simply panicing. Unfortunately, failure to repetively practice the skills and reinforcing the behavior, pretty much negates the value of the training. Since mandating realistic repetitive training regimens would essentially tie our entire society into a costly and complex bureaucratic nightmare of continuous schooling, we have all opted in the interest of greasing the economic wheels of progress to accept approximately 60,000 automotive deaths a year as the price we are prepared to pay to be left alone. Licensing on the other hand may be sold to us as propagating socially responsible group standards, but it really has to do exclusively with extending the governments ability to legally extort revenues. To illustrate this clever governmental scam, and on a somewhat simplistic level, we have all somehow rationalized the absurdity of having to pay to park our machines on a public street, which we're already paying multiple exorbitant fees and taxes for as a privilege of just existing. We actually vote for and place people in positions of authority who then abuse us like this in return. But, I digress! Regarding licensing, and in very general terms, show me a self-contented licensee and I'll show you mediocrity, someone who knows how to manipulate the system for his own gain, or a combination of the two. Competent professionals have about as much respect for licensing as they should - none! It's now just seen by the average citizen as a cost of doing business and the route to becoming a dues paying member of some particular club of leverageres. For their part government entities showcase licensing and resulting standardization as a measure of their success in protecting society, while cleverly relieving us of our cash assets, which effectively limits our mobility and purchase decisions - making us cash-poor prisoners of our own making. We really need to think creatively about how to scale back this monster we've created. It will not be satiated until it consumes us all. Incrimental in growth, we tend to not see it happening. As such, it is an insidious cancer and the most fundamental threat to our remaining freedom. And, wasn't freedom from unreasonable taxation what it was all about to begin with. It appears to me that the British may have won, after all. In parting, I'm glad to have contributed to lifting everyone's spirits!
