Lost two replies, Kelly's Blue Book says a 2001 Ram in fair condition is worth about $1900. That's with 110K or so miles on it. Obviously more mileage or more dents and damage would mean even less value. And it's not easy to actually get Blue Book value when you're selling a used car.

Are you seriously telling me that a large number of people decided to cash in a Ram they could have sold for $5-$6K in exchange for a $4500 voucher? Even if they didn't want the hassel of selling a car privately I'm sure a dealer would have been happy to have brought such a car for $4500 rather than churning the paperwork and lines required for the C4C program.

You are just all over the board here and not even paying attention to facts. You assume just because a 2001 Dodge Ram was eligeable to be turned in under the program that lots of such cars were, in fact, turned in. The Dodge Ram isn't even on the list of the top ten trade ins. You've previously asserted that the top trade in was an SUV for an SUV making it an 'SUV upgrade program'....despite the fact that 81% of the trade ins were trucks in exchange for cars. Must I really supply all the facts here while you just make stuff up?

Like, for example, I picked this car out of the list of eligible cars:

2001....

I think you're misreading stuff. 2001 is not a new car. Are you perhaps looking at the cars turned in under the program versus the ones purchased?

@Jaybird,

Money is not wealth. Money is a convenient fiction/collective illusion/etc

Knock it off. Money is an illusion? Feel free to send me all the illusion in your bank account then !

Wealth is not some infinite 'feely' thing. Yes a working car engine is an asset. It has value and that value is brought and sold in the marketplace. The value of the wealth destroyed could not be more than $4500 a car unless you have evidence of mass insanity on the part of C4C buyers. The value of the wealth destroyed was almost certainly much less than $4500 a car since there would be no point in going thru the C4C hassel for just a few dollars profit.

@Trumwill, I agree that there probably is an increase. I don't think people think about it but it becomes a 'gut feeling'. If you're hitting the gas station a lot, that becomes a little bit of a drag on the idea of going out in the car. If all in the sudden you're not hitting it as often, you think about gas less and will use the car more. I think it's relatively subtle though and impacts driving at the margin. I don't think you're going to change your job commute to add many more miles.

@Jason Kuznicki, I think there's a point to be made about accounting here. When a person switches from a low mpg car to a high one they produce savings in the sense that they use less gas per 1000 miles driven (namely about 23 gallons less per 1000 miles driven).

That savings can be spent anywhere. A person can, for example, take a vacation on the savings. They can use it to jet ski, they can use it to eat out once a week and so on. They can even use it to drive more.

IMO what you do with a savings doesn't cancel out the fact that it's a savings. If a person drives 18,000 miles a year instead of 15,000 because they have a higher mpg car that doesn't neutralize the savings of the car. Presumably out of all the options available, the person has a need or desire for driving over things like taking a vacation. From an environmental perspective it's not even very clear opting for more driving is all that bad a choice. Airplanes consume a huge amount of fuel yet if the 700,000 C4C drivers took trips to the Bahamas you wouldn't criticize that because it would be almost impossible to know. But if they drive 10% more because they like their new, efficient cars, that gets jumped on as a 'failure'.

@Jason Kuznicki, Well actually we did measure it. The DOT knows the average mpg of cars turned in and the average mpg of cars that were purchased by the program. From that we know that the 700,000 vehciles in the US fleet have improved mpg.

Now we don't all have secret gps chips implanted in our cars reporting how many miles we drive. I have seen sites that say we average 15,000 miles per year. At that rate, the average car turned in would have burned 949 gallons a year and the average replacement car would burn 602 gallons a year for a savings of 347 gallons.

Now some critics assert that when people get higher mpg cars they drive as much as 25% more. If that happens then the average C4C car would drive 18750 miles in a year and burn 753 gallons. Still a savings of 196 gallons a year.

In terms of private versus public benefits, I'd say the physical cost of the $4500 was stimulus and at least offset itself with the multiplier. The public cost then comes down to the destroyed capital. The benefit then is split between the private owner's gas savings (let's say $1000 a year from 300 gallons @ $3 a gallon) and whatever the non-market costs of oil are (if you say $0.50 a gallon that's $150 a year). So total benefit per year is something like $1150. I don' t think it could be much lower (gas is nearly $3 a gallon) but it might be higher (the multiplier from stimulus is larger when you're deep in a recession, the non-market costs of oil could very well be a lot more than $0.50 a gal).

You're right, it can get hard to measure but that's not much support for calling it a 'failure'. To use the analogy of your house, yes you increase the value of your home by painting it, by mowing the lawn, keep the yard clean etc. No you can't really measure that in the sense that you can say to yourself every time you mow the lawn you're increasing your home's value by $75.23. You can make some rough estimates, though, so you can figure out if you'll get a bigger return on, say, a new paint job versus adding a level to your deck but they are only estimates.

@Jaybird, Actually we don't really have 'wealth destroyed by program'. We can only guess that it's less than $4500 per car in most cases, probably a lot less. Someone looking for a good economics thesis can probably come up with something more solid by asking for the DOT for a listing of vehicles turned in by make, model, year and mileage.

Also as I pointed out with the NY Times link, total miles driven in the US has fallen in 2009 and fallen even more in 2010. Even if you found gallons purchased by week you're going to have to figure out what portion a change in 0.65% of the US fleet getting better mpg is compared to the overall downward trend. Even if C4C drivers offset their better mpg with more driving I don't think you'd be able to see it even if you got data on gallons of gas sold per day by individual gas station.

If there was no reduction in gas purchases, I think that we have to assume an increase in driving, don’t we?

Feel free to produce the data and let us know what the results are. I'd be curious to know why you think you'd be able to measure the impact C4C against everything else. Why, for example, are the 'few weeks' after C4C so important? When do you put the most pleasure miles on a new car? When you first buy one or months later?

I'd think the better way to study that would be to try to sample C4C owners but even that would be difficult.

@Jason Kuznicki, In what way? I pointed out the run up in used car prices cannot be pinned on C4C because too few vehicles were impacted. Jaybird implied that those who got more efficient vehicles in C4C offset their improved mpg with more driving. My stand on that is that there's no evidence of that. Now fleetwide we aren't seeing more miles driven, we are seeing less. I assume over the entire fleet we are seeing better mpg averages as new cars slowly replace older ones but I didn't say C4C shifted the entire fleet in a noticeable way nor our entire driving habits in a noticeable way.

In fact I even said it doesn't matter if people drive more. If you get more mpg you are saving. If you spend that saving on more driving that doesn't 'defeat the purpose'. You are getting more from the same amount and that's a better state of affairs. Now I'm skeptical that people who got more mpg C4C cars really are driving so much more that they offset the improved mpg....but again why is that a problem?

You can’t tout the program for comprising a tiny percentage of the nation’s auto fleet — hey, no average price increases! — while simultaneously touting how big a change it made in average gas mileage. A tiny number is a tiny number.

Yes I can. The program was a tiny program. If I paint my house I dramatically improve its appearance but in terms of my entire neighborhood or entire state the impact won't even be noticeable. That doesn't make my 'house painting program' a failure.

I'd evaluate my program with a scale that's proper for its scale. If I paint my house I'd expect a dramatic improvement in my house. I'd expect a modest improvement in the overall appearence for the block. A trivial improvement for the town and beyond that I wouldn't expect much of anything that could be detected so why would I try to measure my program by asking how does all the houses in my state appear? Likewise if you have a program that maybe impacted less than 1% of the US fleet why evaluate it based the average of the entire US fleet?

That would be a proper metric if we were talking about a program that was $300B....but we aren't. This reminds me of the bashing Obama took during the election over the Annenberg Challenge that supposedly wasted the Chicago school system (because of the evil influence of Bill Ayers). But when you looked at what was actually done in Chicago it was only a handful of individual schools that implemented some pilot programs....nothing that you could expect to show up by looking at systemwide results data.

Now would it be nice to improve the entire US fleet in mpg by as much as the 700K cars in C4C? Of course, but as I said I think if you tried to scale the program up by, say, multiplying it by 100 you'd start running into problems which would bring your success metric way down. (But that's true of house painting too. My house may get a lot better with a fresh coat of paint but would the entire real estate stock of the US improve as much by fresh paint? Probably not)

@Jaybird, "We have the cost that is the destroyed wealth (the “clunkers” that would have made better used cars for a number of people out there than what they were already driving… the Datsun Pickups, for example)."

I agree with you here. The cars were destroyed when they could have provided us with a few more years of useful service. But this value I believe was pretty low (let's say $500 absent any real numbers). At reducing gas costs $1000 per year we've already recupped that value.

You have the costs associated with the sales falling off a cliff the moment the incentives ended.

Your source said 125,000 additional sales happened that wouldn't have happened so what 'cliff' are you talking about and what costs are you talking about? During a period when there was massive unemployment in the auto industry and auto sales sector what's the cost in making use of unusued resources? were those auto salesmen performing some vital national service by standing on the unemployment line?

http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html

Note that car sales have been pretty steady. Assuming the blue spike above the 6M mark represents the C4C boomlet, there really isn't evidence of a post C4C crash in new auto sales. First of all, 700K is not a big deal when car sales are running at 6 million a year (the graph can be confusing, it's not 6 million a month but an 'annual rate' by month with a seasonal adjustment). More importantly, if this was just about demand shifting then we'd see the annual rate of car sales return to the low before the blue spike, it seems to have returned to a level above (we went from an under 6m per year rate to a slightly under 6m per year rate).

Your cost might have been important if the auto industry was at full employment where the demand for cars would have meant adding temp. workers and training additional workers to fulfill the spike in demand only to let them all go once it disappeared. But at $3B and 10% unemployment the program was simply not large enough to have important effects in that regard.

I’m pretty sure that there are additional costs that I’ve overlooked… such as the opportunity costs of “could this exact same money have been used in a more effective manner to help more/different people rather than, say, the folks in the market to purchase a new car?”

Is this kind of like the opportunity cost I'm presented when I consider whether to put $1 against my electric bill or use the $1 to buy the winning lottery ticket? Yes opportunity cost is real but you really need to take it with a grain of salt and there's a good reason to keep it a seperate consideration than accounting cost. Perhaps there were other places there the gov't has spent $3B to better effect and I'm sure in the world of hypothetical universes where Jaybird rules as the Ever Wise Philosopher King $3B would be employed in even better ways. That's an important thing to consider but not to get too hung up on. In other universes, for example, the US won WWII at a much lower cost. That's important but doesn't justify calling WWII a military failure for the US.

I think it’s quite fair to reach the conclusion that the price was way too high for what we got… even taking the fact that people can now drive 16-25% more than they used to in a week while having to fill up only as much as they used to.

Maybe we do but so what? I figure we incurred a cost of $500-$1500 and are saving about $1K per year, maybe more. We can spend that $1K on anything we please and yes some of that may be doing more driving. Although again this is just speculation on your part. If I got a car with more mpg I might do one or two more road trips in a year but I'm not going to seek a more distant work commute. I'm unlikely to increase my driving by 25%, I don't enjoy it that much.
This nifty chart seems to confirm that:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/05/02/business/02metrics.html

Not only are we driving fewer miles than in 2007-2008 but 2010 seems to be less than 2009 even though the economy is slightly better. Keep in mind, though, that C4C only impacted 700,000 vehicles or so out of a fleet of over 60 million. I don't think anyone really has evidence that C4C drivers have dramatically increased their miles driven nor will you be able to see much of a shift in the marco-variables.

(The number one thing bought by cash for clunkers? SUVs. The number one thing traded in? SUVs. It was an SUV upgrade program. Was that what was intended?)

I don't know but the average trade resulted in going from a 15.8 mpg vehicle to a 24.9 mpg vehicle and 84% of the vehicles turned in were trucks which tend to be worse than SUV's.

Jaybird.

"Is it not fair to weigh the goals vs. the costs..."

Yes but it's not fair to just look at one goal. Doing so, clearly, inflates the calculation of 'cost per unit of goal achieved' in a deceptive manner. To use an analogy, imagine a bar that invests $20,000 in multiple flat screen TV's with the twin goals of bringing more customers to the bar per night and motivating them to spend more per drink. If 4 new customers appear at the bar you could say this investment cost "$5000 per new customer gained" and declare it a failure, but that wouldn't be accurate since you'd also have to include your other goals in the calculation. Namely, did the old customers spend more on drinks than they did before or not?

If it would have been cheaper to just cut a check for $4500 and give that to anybody trading in a car that was X years or older in exchange for a new car with MPG of Y or higher… couldn’t we say that that would have been preferable to a program where people traded in SUVs that got 14/15 MPG for SUVs that got 19/20 MPG at a cost of a hell of a lot more?

I'm not seeing how that would have been cheaper. At the end of the day you're cutting a check for $4500 per car for 700,000 cars. If people brought more expensive new cars under the program as opposed to the hypothetical one that doesn't really alter the cost of the program as the only thing the program pays is the $4500.

As for making it based on years, I'm not seeing why that would have improved things. As I pointed out the average trade in was significantly better in mileage. The savings per car is running near $1,000 per year or even more depending on what you consider the costs of oil uncaptured by the market price.

Now in contrast if the program had only one goal, that of boosting new car sales, it would have been a straight forward $4500 per new car, first come first serve when the $3B is up the program is done. since when you're in a depression just about any form of stimulus works this too would have been 'costless' in the sense that it would have offset its cost with economic growth...but the program as it happened had the nice added effect of boosting the US fleet's mpg which comes in handy when the economy is at full employment.

One of the things you have to weigh the program against is “would doing nothing at all have done as much damage”… and if the answer is “less”, it doesn’t really matter how many ostensible “goals” were reached, does it?

It depends on how valuable the goals were compared with the costs of the program. IMO the only cost of the program was the lost capital in destroying some used cars that still had some useful life in them. As I pointed out I suspect the mpg savings alone offsets that loss since the used cars were almost certainly at the low end of the market.

Now just as a word of caution keep in mind I said I thought the program was the right thing at the right time and the right size. I'm not sure I would have liked it as much if it was $30B or $300B instead of $3B or if it was in place for 5 years or 10 years instead of 1 year. At the scale it was in place I think the program took advantage of a market ineffeciency. Gas is not correctly priced in our economy. In addition to explicit direct and indirect subsidies, there are real costs to using oil that are not captured in the market price of gas. That means that some of those high mpg used cars were on the road because gas is too cheap. If gas was correctly priced those high mpg used cars would have come off the roads faster and made it to the junk yards to get turned into higher mpg cars. So in a way this program would be an example of a gov't regulation offsetting the harm done by other foolish gov't programs. In the ideal world I'd simply have gas priced correctly and let stimulus be more 'pure' (say in the form of a payroll tax holiday coupled with unemployment benefit boosts).

@Jaybird, Kinda misses the point Jaybird. The program had multiple goals, only one of which was to boost car sales. Another goal was to increase the mileage of cars in the US fleet by eliminating low mpg cars and replacing them with high ones. So even if we assume 125K cars were totally new sales how many of the balance of cars sold resulted in higher mpg than would have otherwise been without the program? Likewise the program was also stimulative in order to tap unusued supply during a deep recession. So if a program had 3 major goals why would you evaluate it on only 1?

@Jaybird, The cost per car is $4,285.71. (700,000 cars were sold under the program, $4500 is the max. rebate you could have gotten, if your weren't buying a new car with as great mpg you would get less)

@Scott, Let's think about it a moment. The value of a certain used car is $500. That would seem to include the sum of the value of its parts as well as the value of the car itself....whatever useful driving you can get out of it before it dies.

Since the rebate maxed out at $4500 we can assume almost all the cars had to be worth less than that. Since the rebate is worth the most with the least valuable car, it makes sense that people cashed in the low value cars before the higher value ones. Long story short, what about the spare parts?

Also I could be wrong but I believe only the engine block had to be destroyed so not all spare parts are lost.

In terms of cost, the program came in just under $3B. The fact sheet on http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2009/dot13309.htm provides some useful data. The cost has to be netted against the gains. Ultimately the net cost of the program is only the wasted capital that results in destroying 'useful' cars. But as I pointed out I suspect those useful cars were less useful than critics think.

Recently new used cars? A lightly used car typically costs more than $4500 so that would imply a large number of people cashed in cars for $4500 that they could have sold privately for more. Evidence of that?

In terms of reshuffling, if a new car costs $20K, let's say, the cash portion represented a 25% savings. Are you telling me that a 25% cost reduction would result in no additional sales? I don't think so. More importantly the $4500 serviced as stimulus with an environmental edge. Proper for its time, IMO, but only as a one shot temporary program.

I think given the circumstances C4C was pretty good. It provided stimulus to the economy, did boost domestic auto production (thereby limiting our bailout liabilities a bit) and was a gentle correction to the market (if gas was priced at its true environmental cost, the worst of the junkers would probably be taken off the road). I wouldn't want to make it a permament program though. If it was it would become more liable to gaming with dealers and buyers narrowing the mpg gains. Claims of its failure are quite overstated IMO.

This is incorrect on multiple levels.

1. C4C caused only 700,000 vehicles to be turned in. The US fleet at any given time is about 62 million registered vehicles and 6.4 unregistered ones that are nonetheless functioning. Additionally worldwide car production is about 40-50 million per year. The numbers are simply not enough to cause a supply shortage in the used car market.

2. While I haven't found good figures about the quality of cars turned in, the economics of the situation implies they should have been really junky. Consider two cases, one where a person has a relatively junky used car worth maybe $500 and the other where his car is worth $4400. The $4500 rebate makes a $4K profit for the first person but only a $100 profit for the second. Logic would dicatate that the actual capital destroyed by the program, which I admit is a real cost, is almost certainly very low and was probably not destined to last much longer anyway.

3. Even more damming to the 'increased price' theory is that 84% of the vehnicles turned in were trucks. If anything the prices of used trucks should be shooting up while used cars should remain relatively untouched if C4C had anything but a trivial role to play in the used market.

3.1 This may explain why used car prices are higher. With the recession AND the fact that people still remember $4 or $5 gas, people have less need for work trucks and more desire for fuel efficient cars. In the new market this is no problem, the auto makers simply shift production from trucks to cars. The used market, though, isn't able to shift production. When shopping for 5-10 yr old vehicles you are more or less stuck with the production mix of 5-10 yrs ago.

4. The average replacement vehicle went from 15.8mpg to 24.9mpg. At 13,000 miles driven per year, that's a savings of about 300 gallons. At a conservative cost of gas at $3 per gallon ($2.50 market plus $0.50 non-market costs) that's nearly $1,000 in savings per year. Considering the cost of the destroyed capital is almost certainly not near the $4500 mark, but closer to the $500 mark, chances are the cost of the destroyed capital is already paid for.

Simply alleging defamation does not overcome the First Amendment; you need to show that the defamatory speech was of the sort that the courts have found unprotected by the First Amendment. In the case of a government official being criticized as a government official, this means you’ve got to show actual malice (a tremendously high bar), and a whole bunch of other stuff.

And this is why the 'free speech' cries are spurious. If Breitbart loses a defamation case, it will hardly be because he lacks free speech protections.

No, it is not charging corruption – not all illegal acts by a government official are corrupt, which implies a criminal act and discrimination is not a criminal act.

Asserting that she actively discriminates on the job is defamation just as much as falsely accusing her of being an alcoholic is defamation even if being an alcoholic isn't technically illegal.

Nor will Breitbart get off scot-free here – his reputation has already taken a substantial hit amongst all but his loyal acolytes (who unfortunately are large in number). His credibility is shot with all but those acolytes, which hopefully means that any stories he tries to push in the future will be ignored by the rest of the world.

That's all well and good, maybe, but irrelevant. Sherrod was defamed and harmed and if she wins it would hardly be an empty victory, she would collect good money and Breitbart will pay her good money. For the rest of us defamation law is our friend not our enemy. Lack of defamation laws let's journalists get too sloppy, substituting sensational lies for good reporting. Yes it's possible to have too much defamation protection, in which case you make it almost impossible for honest criticism but as you point out the US has a well balanced law here.

The NAACP or 'liberal groups' have no grounds to sue him. His damage was not done to them but to her and while a trial can certainly be 'emotional' having your life ruined by someone else's defamation of you is much more emotional. Yes its nice that after the fact people came to her defense but the damage was done to her by him and she has a right to sue.

The First Amendment protects speech from gov't interference. It does not prevent private victims of defamation from suing to recover for their damages. He didn't express an opinion that she was a racist, he asserted falsely that she acted to discriminate against whites because they were white. As a gov't employee that's charging corruption as discrimination is illegal and in terms of her reputation its defamation as most private sector positions would disqualify someone who would use their job as a platform for discrimination. Now if she wants to turn the other cheek or if she simply does not want to deal with the time and emotions of a trial that's her business, but I don't see that as a convincing reason for her to be advised against suing him. She has a case and should be heard. His 'free speech rights are not in jeopardy.

I kind of recall a few years ago conservatives cheering on some Texas cattlemen who sued Oprah for 'defaming the beef industry' or some such nonsense so I'm going to say go with it! Let's see if Breitbart's supporters really have the rhetorical courage to make him a 'free speech martyr'. The gist of your argument here seems to be right wing wackos should be given yet another pass because to do anything else about it will just get them all excited.

Yes she was gov't official and that does set the bar higher. In this context, I'd say racism is not just name calling. It's an assertion that she is of low character (i.e. some type of white-hating radical black panther type) and corrupt (i.e. inclined to use her position in an illegal manner). That's not a criticism of gov't policy but a personal attack on an individual's character and yes that is exactly what defamation suits were designed for. Yes Breitbart has a defense but the woman has a case. She was raked thru the coals, lost her job and probably was subjected to death threats until the right wing machine realized its error and backed off. She should have her case heard and maybe, just maybe, ilk like Breitbart will actually have an incentive to add some better reporting practices in their partisanship rather than just running with anything that sounds like it will serve their ideological agendas.

Speaking of taking Hayek seriously, I was in B&N on Sunday and spent an hour perusing the new paperback edition of The Road to Serfdom. Very interesting because of what I did not find.

There is absolutely no reference to Keynesian economics in the entire book. There is a citation of Keynes reporting on Germany in 1915 but that's it. In one of the three or four introductions there's a reference to critics of the book that included Keynes, however his letter to Hayek praised the book as "grand" and only offered a very mild criticism that he made a case for drawing a line but didn't articulate where the line should be very well.

What you will find is a huge number of references not about even the USSSR but Nazi Germany and an attempt to point out that Nazism was socialism minus its liberal aspects. It would seem to me that in retrospect this book has been recast as a counter-argument to Keynes but it really isn't. It's a counter argument to the idea that socialism and the 'planned economy' was the wave of the future. In many respect Keynes and Hayek were on the same team.

Advocates of planning at the time were coming from two angles. On one side were communists and socialists who felt Nazi Germany was the endpoint of capitalism. Hayek found this view totally wrong. From what I know of Keynes, he felt that Germany's moral implosion was caused by the unreasonable demands of WWI's peace. Not that Germany had reached some type of ultimate level of the capitalism video game.

On the other side were advocates of 'planning'. While vague on theory, this group had a sense that the economy should be 'managed' just as urban development was managed by urban planners, schools were managed by educational associations, and so on. This group was probably inspired by numerous forces including the rise of scientific management in the late 19th century, the rise of the professional urban class, the soft-paternalism of the Victorian upper class ("we refined educated gentlemen have a duty to direct and care for the less well off") as well the fact that WWII was demanding that countries engage in national economic planning to secure enough capital for the war effort while managing demand at home for civilian goods.

This groups policies were not aggregate demand management (Keynes's more or less 'hands off' approach of making sure the pool has enough water in it) but more direct management of the economy. In the Depression this meant various price controls, trying to move industry into large cartels, various schemes to inflate prices by creating artificial labor shortages and so on. While FDR has been retconned into a pure Keynesian, the reality was that he was all over the map on economics. His NRA, for example, was the epitome of economic planning. Later he advocated for free enterprise (Hayek even quoted him approvingly at the beginning of the book, praising free enterprise as the idea that hasn't yet been tried!, the quote was from 1938!)

No doubt other forces were pushing in favor of planning. The urban environment in the first half of the 20th Century seemed to argue that planning was needed to avoid choas. The heavy industrialization with huge numbers of workers being employed by giant factories also seemed to hint that aside from some minor small businesses, the wave of the future was not the small shop but industrial giant. The labor movement and last but not least the fact that the USSR fought as an ally with the US and UK against Nazi Germany set off a brief period where criticizing the USSR was unfashionable.

The argument is great and the history is fascinating but its also a dead argument IMO. The 'planned economy' is no longer advocated by anyone, esp. in this age of the wiki. (Not that planners ever really did get off the ground and present a coherent theory that explained how you actually manage a planned economy).

@Rufus F.,

Where I'm going though is that sometimes those 'community norms' can jump the shark from simple 'peer pressure' to legitimate law. For example, zoning laws. Part of this is the rules of the game that we all 'agreed too' when we joined certain communities but part of this also transcends that.

The recent debate over Civil Rights laws illustrate this. If this was only about the norms that existed as 'community law' when we 'joined' then segregationists had a legitimate claim. When they purchased their businesses they were buying into a segregated community that was historically segregated and had its norms supported by law. The 'rules of the game' were indeed being changed on them.

But norms had changed and they weren't bound by the previous norms no matter how deeply enshrined they were in law and tradition.

Outside of certain, very liberal cities, we’d have to keep aspects of our life secret wherever we go.

Unless you're, say, a smoker in which case you're going to have to travel to those gossipy small towns to buy cigarettes at price that is not halfway insane and even so you won't even be able to smoke them in the back of the bus!!!