Daylight Savings Stupidity
A conservative argument against the status quo.
Daylight savings. What a delight. That special time of year where we get to spring forward the clocks in the, well, spring, and then fall back in the, well, fall. Tis a joy to travel through the time warps. It is truly quite amazing how we are able to shoot forward a full hour in the future every year and follow that through by blasting to the past a full sixty minutes later on in the same year. It has become quite the American tradition for families to gather around the clock into the late hours of the night and adjust their clocks, shaking up time itself. What would we do without daylight savings? Wait, what am I saying?…
Look, if you don’t live in Arizona, Hawaii, or our blessed American territories, you probably felt awful this Sunday morning because you lost an hour of sleep. Sure, it’s nice in the fall when we gain an hour, but that doesn’t discount our present predicament. We were all forced to lose an hour of sleep, and we’re probably all ticked about it. We find ourselves in a situation where we suddenly have to adjust to the new time shift, and twice every year at that. Frankly, it’s stupid. In fact, there’s a bipartisan consensus that agrees that this is stupid. It’s amazing that much hasn’t been done to reflect the will of the people.
Well, in 2022, we were actually close to ending this monstrosity, but, as a testament to the ineffectiveness of Congress, it fell through. The Senate actually passed a bill to end this time warping cycle by a vote of unanimous consent. Marvelous! Huzzah! But the House never got around on voting for it. And so, the bill died. Dash it! However, all may not be lost. Once again, there is a bipartisan push to end daylight savings in Congress. Time will tell (pun intended) whether or not the bill will make it to the President’s desk.
Daylight savings deserves to go, and fundamentally, the case to be made against this sabotaging of the clocks is a conservative argument. After all, it came about in a very unconservative fashion (Wikipedia has a nice overview the history here). In America, it started as a relic of the Woodrow Wilson administration during the first World War in an effort to conserve fuel with an extra hour of sunlight. It was a very unpopular act, and it only got scrapped after the war through Congress legislating it into the nether for the time being. But Wilson, scoundrel that he was, chose to veto the act. So Congress had to override the veto in order to do away with it. Unfortunately, it came back with World War II for similar reasons. After that war was finished and the nationwide daylight savings was over, some states chose to go on with it anyway. Furthermore, in some states that did not follow daylight savings, certain cities and towns within those states would observe it. That is, you could live in a state where the time is one thing, make a trip to visit some relatives who live not too far away, and then enter within a new zone. This created mass confusion, especially for the transportation industry. Eventually, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration passed a law instituting a new nationwide daylight savings standard (some states and territories chose to opt out, as they do today). From then on, central planners in Washington would continue to tinker with the clock, and so here we are today.
The history of daylight savings is a history of government at both the state and federal levels interfering with our daily lives. Sure, there may have been a perfectly reasonable rationale for instituting it during the times of world wars, but guess what: We’re not in those times anymore! And even if we were, our society can function now much more effectively whether the sun is out or not. Now it is just a nuisance. I find it funny the way Wikipedia describes the “Inconvenience” of it all:
DST [Daylight Savings Time]'s clock shifts have the disadvantage of complexity. People must remember to change their clocks; this can be time-consuming, particularly for mechanical clocks that cannot be moved backward safely.
Go figure.
Clearly, for a conservative, daylight savings is not something worth conserving. It is pointless, and it is a product of government inserting itself as the clock-keeper. Conservatives ought to rally behind the principle that the government ought to stop messing around with our clocks. It will be a step towards more limited government. Best of all, this is an issue that can enjoy much popular support. This could save the conservative movement. I speak that in jest, but this is a good area for conservatives to make a case that the government should stop what they’ve been doing to our clocks. But, there are obstacles.
Over an issue that has much popular support like ditching daylight savings, there are divisions. Do we keep it at daylight savings time, or do we go with “standard time” (when we set our clocks back in the fall)? That is a complicated question, which I will not be getting into. I will say this though: If we just left the clocks alone, we wouldn’t have to be arguing over which time standard we make permanent. This is just another example of how the government screws up so many things.
Nevertheless, this needs to stop. Imagine how simpler things would be if we didn’t have to change our clocks every year. I’m sure those lucky citizens who live in the states and territories that don’t observe the daylight savings ritual are enjoying not having to deal with this silliness. But we can end the silliness nationwide, and then we can engage in some good old-fashioned imperialism and end it worldwide. But I’ve said enough. This is the end of the matter for now.
