The Obama administration is proposing to spend nearly $4 billion in a decade to accelerate the acceptance of driverless cars on US roads and curb traffic fatalities and travel delays.

No. The Congress needs to refuse to provide the funding for this.

Leave aside whether we want driverless cars on our roads. There’s an arguably positive role for government to actively support, even help fund, basic research. However, once the theory from such basic research has been developed sufficiently (a private enterprise-defined criterion), bringing any related concepts to market is purely an engineering matter and so must be solely a free market/producer/consumer decision. The work, then, should be funded only by private enterprise.

Government has no business picking winning or losing technologies, and that’s what it does when it funds bring-it-to-market schemes. That’s unavoidable, no matter the intentions of the politicians pushing such an expense.

President Barack Obama’s proposal here is intended to facilitate the development of regulations to govern driverless cars. Leave aside here the Progressives’ idea that Americans and our businesses need a government rule for every aspect of what we do, or don’t do. This…regulation development…is nothing more than another bring-it-to-market scheme.