Whenever this blog has been active, I have posted semiannual denunciations of DST (“Deranged System of Timekeeping”), marking both its imposition and its (alas, temporary) end. I suppose that everything that can be said on the topic has been repeated ad infinitum. The arguments for DST were already past their sell-by date when I first heard them over sixty years ago, when my then and future home state of Washington put the question to a popular vote. TV commercials promised that a “yes” would give voters “an extra hour of daylight”, suggesting that jumping clocks ahead would slow the Earth’s rotation on its axis. The vote was very close – 51.71% to 48.29% – so the fools had only a slim majority. (In the same year, the similarly specious JFK lost the state.)
This year I’ll pursue the soul of wit by limiting myself to a paragraph from Scott Johnson’s Powerline post:
Redistributing daylight is the kind of zero-sum game that underlies the liberals’ vision of the world. The hour of daylight in the evening comes at the expense of the morning. At least it is in fact only a zero-sum game. [emphasis added]
If DST affected nature the same way that progressive policies affect the economy, “springing forward” would take an hour away from morning and add only about fifty minutes to the afternoon.
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