Suppose you were a government regulator. After extensive notice and comment and careful study, you determine that everyone should get up an hour earlier. You also determine that they should eat lunch an hour earlier and go to bed an hour earlier.
In Paris in 1784, Benjamin Franklin calculated that such changes in behavior would have large economic benefits. Franklin then lived under the highly regulatory French Old Regime. To get everyone up earlier and to bed earlier, he proposed new taxes, commodity quantity rationing, new transportation regulations, regulation of church bells, and, if necessary, a new government agency that would regularly fire cannons in the streets. Modern regulators would never dream of such an extensive regulatory scheme.
Daylight savings time achieves these same regulatory goals with much less extensive and intrusive regulation. This regulatory tool required the rise of factories and telegraph networks to develop both the practice and the wide-area capability to standardize time. But given such standardization, shifting time is a remarkably powerful regulatory tool. Recent research indicates that, in the U.S., year-round daylight savings time could save per year hundreds of lives and millions of dollars.
Hundreds of lives and millions of dollars could also be saved with the abolition of income tax.
Elimination of needless sacrifices of time preparing returns would create a net increase of productivity.
Then, we’d be ruled by Big Business rather than Big Government and our little lives would be bounded by corporocrats instead of bureaucrats.
Moo!