Back in the 1970s, air pol­lu­tion was really bad. The aver­age car back then put out lit­er­ally 20 times the amount of harm­ful emis­sions than today’s aver­age car. If the gov­ern­ment had not stepped in and made laws that forced car man­u­fac­tur­ers to clean up what was com­ing out of tailpipes, I am sure we’d have dirt­ier air today.

I haven’t been to China, but I under­stand the air in Bei­jing is a lot worse than the air in any Amer­i­can city. Why? A lack of gov­ern­men­tal regulation.

I fully under­stand that not all gov­ern­men­tal inter­ven­tions in life and pub­lic pol­icy are ben­e­fi­cial. But some are.

I chal­lenge you to argue with me on this one.

The photo is an enlarge­ment of a shot from Autoweek Mag­a­zine. Their May 14, 2012 issue has an arti­cle about the new Dodge Dart. Its front grille shuts at cer­tain speeds to improve fuel econ­omy — because of gov­ern­men­tal reg­u­la­tions for car man­u­fac­tur­ers to increase fuel econ­omy. I think that’s awesome.

So there’s a boxer. His name is Floyd May­weather, Jr. He has two iden­ti­cal sets of cars — a white set in Las Vegas and a black set in Miami. Each set includes a Bent­ley, a Mer­cedes Benz SLS AMG, a Fer­rari and an unknown fourth car. My guess on the total value (and there may be more than four cars) is about $2 mil­lion. Some­how it’s not the money spent that both­ers me. It’s the identical-but-different-color aspect.

Of course I’m think­ing of how one man has all those opu­lent and amaz­ing cars, and how the money could have been spent on a slightly bet­ter edu­ca­tion for kids in either city. Or how some kids in Africa might not die because they have clean water.

But some­how I mostly think of what a strange thing is is to have two identical-but-different-color sets of cars.

(Thanks to the May 10, 2012 Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine for the arti­cle fea­tur­ing this photo.)

Mer­cedes and BMW are both guilty of padding their num­bers. Not in a finan­cial sense but rather in mak­ing their prod­ucts appear larger than what they really are. This reflects an accu­rate under­stand­ing of how Amer­i­cans value big­ger things.

The forth-coming Mer­cedes SL550 has a 4.7 liter engine. It used to be that Mer­cedes would badge such a model as the SL470. No longer. BMW does the same thing with their 328i ... the lat­est model has a 2.0 liter engine.

In Europe, this infla­tion is slightly less. The SL550 is badged as the SL500.

Engine sizes are going down, as vehi­cle man­u­fac­tur­ers are fig­ur­ing out how to get more power out of less engine. That’s a good thing. Fuel econ­omy usu­ally goes up when these changes hap­pen. And then you save when you fill up at the gas station.

I long for the day when real num­bers will be given for things.

Photo cour­tesy of Desertspot­ter.