Trucking Rules Are Eased

If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would not need to dream up Ralph Nickleby’s investment in the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company with its proposed monopoly of “vast national importance,” for Dickens would already have Joseph M. Clapp and his cronies at the American Trucking Associations, who, like their brethren throughout American industry, have perfected the Bush-era technique of issuing seemingly rational justifications of their rapacious and utterly selfish practices such as, “without longer work hours, the industry would be forced to put more drivers with little experience behind the wheel.” These upstanding capitalists must have read their Dickens, who 168 years ago portrayed the justification of a royal muffin monopoly as urgently needed lest “the houses of the poor” remain “destitute of the slightest vestige of a muffin.”

Sources:
Charles Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby), original year of publication: 1838.
The New York Times, "As Trucking Rules Are Eased, a Debate on Safety Intensifies" by Stephen Labaton (Ron Nixon contributing), 12/3/06 page 1.