An American Father-Son Duo Decides to Super-Charge the Speed on Germany's Autobahn

Highway Robbery Continues to Be the Law of the Land, deplores James Bovard at the Mises Wire:

You could be at risk of being pilfered by officialdom anytime you sit behind a steering wheel. … Federal, state, and local law enforcement have institutionalized shakedowns on the nation’s highways to the point that “forfeiture corridors are the new speed traps,” as Mother Jones observed.

Police can almost always find an excuse to pull someone over. Gerald Arenberg, executive director of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me in a 1996 interview, “We have so damn many laws, you can’t drive the streets without breaking the law.” 

 … Almost two hundred and fifty years ago, Arthur Lee of Virginia aptly proclaimed, “The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is to deprive them of their liberty.” But increasingly, private property is something that officialdom merely tolerates until they concoct some pretext to seize it.

If police can detain and plunder Americans as they please whenever people drive down the road, all the other rights and liberties in the Constitution are of scant consolation.

 

That's why it is so refreshing to have a country in which the speed limits on highways are next to non-existent. In this particular case, the Germans are the heroes, with lessons for the Americans. 

Over at the New York Times, the Berlin bureau chief for The Times (leading coverage of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), Jim Tankersley, reports on a drive from Berlin to Dortmund on the famed German highway: Father-Son Bonding at 2 Miles Per Minute on Germany’s Fabled Autobahn.

I taught my older son to drive the same way my father taught me, with equal doses of caution and paranoia. Sometimes, riding shotgun on the interstate, I would spy the speedometer creeping above the limit and hear my dad’s words tumbling out.

“Hey, pal,” I would say to Max. “How fast are you going?”

I found myself recalling one of those moments this summer, behind the wheel of a black BMW. My son sat next to me, watching with glee as we hit 125 miles per hour.

 … As happens when children grow up — and especially when you move a continent away from them — we had missed Father’s Day together. For a belated celebration, my wife had given us tickets to see our favorite band, Wilco, play a rare show in Germany.

When he slid into the car, the band was set to take the stage in Dortmund, on the other side of the country, in less than three hours. Google Maps said the drive would take five.

We could abandon the show. Or we could unlearn some fatherly lessons, at least for a day, and press our luck on the autobahn.

They tell you highway driving is different in Germany, where for long stretches there are no speed limits. 

 … I had a German driver’s license but had not lost my aversion to high speeds. I could still hear my dad, eyeing other cars, reminding me, “They’re out to get you.”

 … This was desperate. On the autobahn, I told myself I would drive as fast as traffic, safety and German engineering would allow. … (We checked trains to Dortmund; none would have delivered us to the show in time.)

On the road, … We blew past windmills and practiced our German. We watched the Google estimate shrink steadily. We started to hope we might catch the second set of the concert.

When the time was right, we called my dad.

“We just hit 200 kilometers an hour,” I said, triumphantly. “That’s 125 in miles!”

To my father’s credit, he laughed.

We made it to Dortmund in just over 3 hours, 20 minutes, parking a block away from the tiny outdoor venue. We’d only missed a half-dozen songs. We patted each other on the back.

Max sang loudly along with Jeff Tweedy and the band. “I can’t believe it,” we kept saying to each other. …