Not the cooking guy. I’m talking about the the quirky automobile columnist for the Washington Post. He also hosts a Saturday morning show on D.C.’s Washington Post Radio that I frequently catch while I’m running errands.

This morning, the subject was the Virginia legislature’s buckling on the issue of traffic cameras. Brown was livid, and spent the bulk of the two hours railing against the use of red light and speed cameras. It was so refreshing to hear a mainstream journalist say things like, “I’m sick and tired of politicians eroding our civil liberties out of some false justification of ’safety.’” He even bashed the media for being “government cheerleaders” on traffic issues.

I actually called in to compliment him, and recommended he visit the TheNewspaper.com or the National Motorists Association (I got in a dig at AAA, too, noting that NMA is like Triple-A, only it actually cares about the rights of motorists).

I’ve never detected any libertarian sympathies in Brown before, and I doubt he’d call himself one now. It’s more likely that his vehement opposition to traffic camera stems from the fact that he was recently issued a ticket for running a red light in D.C. while he was attending a conference in Seattle. And he was pissed that he had to take up his valuable time to get the thing corrected. More evidence of my theory that “libertarianism happens to people.”

Still, he had a pretty fundamental understanding of the case against traffic cameras, from the due process concerns to accuracy problems to the incentive problems to the larger-picture problem of how overly broad and usually false notions of “public safety” have come to supersede civil liberties.

And when callers phoned in to shame him and toss out red herrings about the evils of red-light runners (as if opposition to red light cameras equates with support for running red lights), he calmly and eloquently held his ground.

So all praise be to you, Warren Brown. Now that we’ve secured the Post’s automotive section, on to the editorial page!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 10:44 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.