Yes, Abolish Daylight Saving Time

Yes, Abolish Daylight Saving Time Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,For all our lives, we’ve been subjected to forced seasonal time change. Spring forward, fall back. That’s how we learn from childhood how to remember this.We are also told the reason early on. We are extending daylight hours. But only a moment’s thought reveals this to be untrue. The light you gain from a one-hour change is borrowed from later in the day.Government cannot magically make the day longer.It’s like the old joke, supposedly from an “old Indian” who points out that you cannot make a blanket longer by cutting off one end and sewing it on the other.I’ve never met anyone who approves of this massive disruption in our sense of time. Some people prefer Standard Time, while others prefer Daylight Saving Time, depending on their area within a given zone. But regardless, it seems as if everyone agrees that we should stick to one version of time and not change it so brutally in the middle of a year.To be sure, all this became mechanically easier once time became digital. We don’t have to have friends, family, neighbors, and the TV yelling at us to turn back the clock or bump it forward. But it seems as if there are always a few clocks around that do not automatically change, such as the kitchen clock with the battery or the oven clock. Then we have to figure out how the stupid thing works and fuss with it, twice per year.Every study shows that this disruption is terrible for health, as it disrupts sleep patterns and contributes to mental fatigue and even depression. It is associated with increased hospital admissions and even car crashes. This should not shock us. Our bodies are regulated by patterns of the sun, more so than we know.Then there are the missed appointments.If everyone hates it so much, why does it persist? It keeps happening simply because it keeps happening. No one knows how to get rid of it. While there is widespread public hatred of the practice, there is no real lobbying force to do anything about it.Forced seasonal time disruptions are the paradigmatic case of a system that just keeps going on because no one really knows how to stop it, even though no one really likes it.Fortunately, President-elect Donald Trump has an uncanny sense of the public mood. He is the first political figure in my lifetime who has openly blasted Daylight Saving Time and sworn to end it on the federal level. If states want to keep it, fine. My prediction is that it will go away completely. That’s a good thing.Oddly, I find myself thrilled by this! It thoroughly confuses children, dogs, and adults, too. The whole crazy business began during World War I as a way to conserve energy and cause the daylight to arrive earlier in the day for purposes of munitions manufacturing. Others say there were some agricultural reasons, too.The reason that this all began had plenty to do with a fashionable scientism of the time. Elites had come to enjoy toying with all things under the general belief that mechanized schemes cou...