Never give away power you are not happy to see abused.

I was commenting some time ago about the connection between America's free wheeling approach to cars and how, famously, the dark night of fascism is always falling on America but landing in Europe (in Guns and cars and consent and powers. My argument was in part that centralized governments have a powerful motive to constrain who is able to drive. Free to drive means less capacity to control.

Suzanne Daley is actually writing about the issue of regulatory capture, rent seeking and economic scleroticism in her article A Driving School in France Hits a Wall of Regulations. However, she also makes part of my case. Trying to get a license to drive in France is an exercise in frustration and futility.

The rules set up barriers to newcomers, sometimes indirectly. Lowering them has become a critical test of France’s willingness to confront its declining competitiveness and the drain of its young people to London and other more flexible places from a country where protecting entrenched interests has always ranked higher, politically and culturally, than innovation.

[snip]

But there has been scant progress so far. In the case of driving schools, the government offers only a limited number of exams each year, and these are doled out to the driving schools depending on their success rate the year before. That fact alone gives the old guard a virtual monopoly, according to Gaspard Koenig, who wrote a book on his own (failed) efforts to get a driver’s license here, despite having graduated from one of France’s most elite universities.

[snip]

The failure rate for the French driving exam is about 41 percent, the government office for road safety said. The cost to the economy goes beyond the embarrassment of those who fail, according to those who have studied it.

Francis Kramarz, an economist who has studied the French licensing system, says that barriers to getting a license are so high that about one million French people, who should have licenses, have never been able to get them.

[snip]

Under the current system, would-be drivers register with a driving school. The schools offer instruction in their own classrooms (“often smelly caves,” according to Mr. Koenig) for the written test and on the road. They also determine when students can take an exam.

Since the school never has enough slots for all its students, it picks the best students first. The wait can stretch 18 months or longer. Although students are required to take only 20 hours of driving lessons, most end up doing double that while they wait for a chance to take the test.

Never give away power you are not happy to see abused.