Car marketers (a.k.a. corporate capitalists) peddle their monumentally wasteful and dangerous products as indispensable bundles of joy and comfort.

Curious then, how the three happiest countries in the world rank in the motor vehicles per capita department:

Denmark: #1 in happiness, #28 in automobiles per person

Switzerland: #2 in happiness, #15 in automobiles per person

Austria: #3 in happiness, #10 in automobiles per person

And how does the USA, by far the world’s most car-intensive society rank in terms of human happiness?

We’re #23.

From the beginning, corporations and allied planners and politicians have promoted the automobile with large doses of syrupy propaganda about its overwhelming wonders and benignity. This wave of dogma routinely includes paeans to the automobile’s allegedly democratic and egalitarian nature. According to Rutgers University transportation engineer James A. Dunn, for example, not only does “the auto provide a kind of individualist equality that is particularly well suited to American values,” but owning and driving cars “unites [Americans] across class, racial, ethnic, and religious lines as few other aspects of our society can.”

Alas, Dunn seems not to have examined the most basic data on the distribution of automobiles in the United States, to say nothing of the world. If he had bothered to do so, he might have discovered that, contrary to long-running industry intimations and intellectual pre-suppositions, cars are, in fact, one of the most unequally distributed product categories in the United States.

Here is a table I just assembled from the most recent Consumer Expenditure Survey:

As you can see, the rich are savers/investors, but they also dominate spending.  New vehicle spending in particular.

That sucking sound you hear?  A century’s worth of cars = freedom + democracy incantation going into the flushbowl, where it belongs.