In 2008, the Washington legislature passed a law mandating a 50 percent reduction in per capita driving by 2050. California and Oregon laws or regulations have similar but somewhat less draconian targets.

The Obama administration wants to mandate that all new cars come equipped with vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, so the car can send signals to and receive messages from street lights and other infrastructure.

Now the California Air Resources Board is considering regulations requiring that all cars monitor their owners’ driving habits, including but not limited to how many miles they drive, how much fuel they use, and how much pollution or greenhouse gases they emit.

Put these all together and you have a system in which the government will not only know where your vehicle is at all times, but can turn off your vehicle if it decides you are driving too much or driving in a way that emits too many grams of carbon dioxide or is otherwise offensive to some bureaucratic imperative.

I sometimes think privacy advocates are a paranoid bunch, seeing men in black around every corner and surveillance helicopters or drones in the air at all times. On the other hand, if a technology is available–such as the ability to record cell phone calls–the government has proven it will use it.

Consider all of the lovable progressives out there who think the government should “punish climate change liars,” meaning people who have differing opinions on scientific issues. It’s not much a stretch to think that, any time they happen to be in power, they will use the available technology to make people stop driving. After all, just how important can that extra trip to the supermarket be compared to the absolute imperative of preventing the seas from rising a quadrillionth of an inch?

Of course, the elected officials and bureaucrats who run this system will exempt themselves from the rules. After all, nothing is more important than their work of running the country and making sure people don’t abuse their freedom by engaging in too much mobility.

As California writer Steven Greenhut points out, we already have red-light cameras, and some “eastern states have suspended drivers from using toll lanes after their transponders showed them to be speeders.” They’re not invading our privacy, the greens will argue, they are just making sure that our actions aren’t harming Mother Earth.

Of course, for many it really isn’t about greenhouse gas emissions. Mobility allows (or, as anti-auto groups would say, forces) people to living in low-density “sprawl” where they can escape taxation by cities eager to subsidize stadiums, convention centers, and light-rail lines. All they have to do is ramp down people’s monthly driving rations–something like a cap-and-trade system that steadily reduces the caps–and suburbanites will eventually find that they have to move back to the cities.

No doubt some will argue that even those who drive the most fuel-efficient cars should be subject to the same driving limits because suburban homes waste energy too. Or that people will be safer from terrorists if they are all jammed together in cities close to emergency facilities than if they are spread across the countryside. Or that suburbanites are parasites on the cities and should be reassimilated back into the cities’ benign embrace and taxing districts.

Whatever the argument, the point is that if the technology is there, the government will use it. If people really want to buy cars that monitor their every move and are capable of communicating those moves to some central infrastructure, they should be allowed to do so. But allowing the government to mandate these things is simply asking to have well-meaning, and sometimes not-so-well-meaning, government bureaucrats control how we travel and where we live.