OPINION:
President-elect Donald Trump pledged over the weekend to end the government’s manipulation of time. This may prove to be a policy that unites the nation.
“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation,” he wrote on Truth Social last Friday.
At least eight Senate Democrats, including Ron Wyden of Oregon and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, endorsed legislation last year that would have made daylight saving time permanent.
“It’s time to lock the clock and stop enduring the ridiculous and antiquated practice of switching our clocks back and forth,” the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, said at its introduction.
Few government policies more faithfully demonstrate the folly of the nanny state mindset than daylight saving time. Busybodies succeeded in persuading Uncle Sam to force most Americans to adjust their timepieces twice a year, lest they be alone in waking up at a different time to catch the sunlight.
In 1918, when this idea was imported from Germany, maybe adjusting a single pocket watch wasn’t a big deal. In the 21st century, just about every gadget — from cars to ovens — displays the hours and minutes of the day.
Today’s smarter devices can synchronize with radio signals to automate the process, but figuring out how to update the clock on an old microwave is the least of the problems the mandate has introduced.
No less a figure than Benjamin Franklin mocked the statist mentality behind daylight saving time in an anonymous letter. “Oblige a man to rise at four in the morning,” he wrote, “and it is more than probable he will go willingly to bed at eight in the evening; and, having had eight hours sleep, he will rise more willingly at four in the morning following.”
Forcing everyone in Paris to follow this schedule would save, he calculated, 64 million pounds of candle wax. He proposed absurdly harsh measures to enforce compliance: “Let guards also be posted to stop all the coaches, etc. that would pass the streets after sunset, except those of physicians, surgeons, and midwives.”
Franklin’s satire became reality as the COVID-19 pandemic got underway.
The modern clock change flows from the same quest for imaginary savings. Instead of wax, it’s electricity — or maybe it’s saving carbon dioxide now. Advocates of government expansion rarely pause to consider the cost accompanying the purported savings. For instance, the constant springing forward and falling back plays havoc with sleep cycles.
A University of British Columbia study from 1998 quantified the impact by examining deaths taking place on U.S. highways right after each clock change. On average, road deaths spiked 17% after the spring clock change, without a corresponding safety advantage in the fall. “Just because a person has the opportunity to sleep for an additional hour does not mean that people actually will go to sleep on time,” the researchers wrote.
Much of the online disagreement with the incoming president’s plan interprets Mr. Trump’s statement as an endorsement of standard time over daylight time. That misses the point. What matters is dispensing once and for all with this pointless semiannual ritual.
Regardless of the exact form of implementation, those who want to “save” sunlight remain free to rise at four in the morning. Just think of the savings in candle wax.
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