Down with Metrication

Tucker Carlson was right. After this segment aired, social media erupted with anti-Tucker boos and hisses? Why?

To quote Lew Rockwell (2014):

Under Republican Gerald Ford, the US government tried to impose by force the metric system on all of American life. Scientists had earlier adopted it for themselves, and that was fine, but the French Revolutionary construct was alleged to be better than the ancient and humane foot, yard, pound, etc., even for commerce. (The creepy Jacobins also wanted to get rid of traditional month names and start over again with Year 1, and make the clock decimal.) For me, the high water mark of the US campaign was seeing signs on the highway indicating the distance in kilometers to the next city, and then in tiny numbers underneath, the distance in miles. But folks, it didn’t work. People refused to go along, to the continuing upset of the Progs. BTW, the French government had to return to old month names and year numbering, and never got away with decimal time, but tragically, they did succeed in abolishing the old weights and measures. And, of course, in committing mass murder of domestic dissidents and foreigners under the monster Bonaparte. Constructivism seems all of a piece.

To quote the late Ralph Raico (2015):

Lew, I was interested to see the article by Eric Peters, on the allegedly super-scientific metric system. That was, of course, another of the brainstorms of the French revolutionaries, who aimed to extirpate all of the inherited traditions and ways of life of the people they came (briefly) to rule over. Peters’s article brought to mind the critique by the “reactionary anarchist,” Gustave de Molinari, who founded the doctrine of anarcho-capitalism, horrifying even famous liberals like Bastiat. Rejecting the French Revolution root and branch, Molinari attacked “the system of weights and measures, invented by professors of mathematics, in contempt of the experience and needs of those engaging in exchange.” Throughout his very long life, he was tireless in condemning imperialism and war, including Lincoln’s war. That conflict, Molinari held, “ruined the conquered provinces,” but permitted the Northern industrialists to impose the protectionism that led to “the regime of trusts and produced the billionaires.” No wonder Murray loved this guy.

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7:58 am on June 14, 2019