As we approach the New Year, the #1 offical alcohol drinking night of the Year, I have a modest proposal for the youth of America: Trade in your driver's licences for drinking licences.

It is astonishing to reflect on how much the automobile has changed our physicial landscape and our culture. The legal drinking age in most countries around the world is 16 or 18, but in car-culture America it is 21. The main reason for this difference is more than just the usual American Puritanical attitudes, but rather a secular progressive movement led by groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) to lower alcohol-related death rates on America's highways and byways. Prior to a 1984 Federal law linking highway funding to the 21 year drinking age (later upheld by a 1987 Supreme Court ruling) each state set it's own drinking age. Since then the law (paternalism?) has been credited with saving thousands of lives on America's highways. It has also stood up time and again to ridicule at the inconsistencies between being able to vote, join the military, smoke cigarettes, buy firearms, get married, run for political office, but not have a pint of beer at a bar.