Why Won’t America Adopt the Metric System

The only impediment to arguing against the metric system is the programming that people receive in the public education system.

Actual logic is on the side of the advocate of imperial/US units of measure:

The metric system is generally touted as being easy to convert, from one unit type to another. And it is.

But normal people almost never do this. Converting numbers is the domain of the bureaucrat and academic, while everyone else is simply attempting to determine some specific measurement, in isolated instances.

The metric system’s base 10 standard, therefore, is actually an impediment. It spreads the units of measure apart too widely.

Imperial is based on a much more advanced and universally useful numeric system: Base 2, also known as Binary.

Having evolved naturally, Imperial has units at exactly the intervals normal people are likely to find most useful. And then, if the closest unit isn’t perfect, you simply split it in half, or double it, until you are as close as you need. One cup is most useful for a recipe, but then you have a pint (two cups), or a half cup, quarter cup, 1/8th, or a tablespoon (1/16th).

Yes, there are 12 inches in a foot; but that’s because conversion to another unit is not important to real people, 99% of the time. You choose the unit nearest to your need, and then adjust it in binary.

Likewise, if guests are coming over, you can increase that recipe by half, easily. Your cup of milk becomes 1 1/2 cups of milk…

Meanwhile, poor Europeans, forced by their government bureaucrats to use metric, are stuck trying to figure out what 150% of 236 milliliters (1 cup) will be.

Even some professionals prefer the imperial system. For example, having to break up units by tens is useless to archetects and other draftsmen, because one millimeter is too large for precision work, and one tenth of one millimeter is too small for the human eye to even discern. So they are forced, when bureaucrats require that they use the metric system, to break the rules and rely on “half millimeters”. Imagine that.

This is why NO NATION ON EARTH has ever adopted the metric system voluntarily. It has, in every case, been imposed by government coercion. The government announces, in effect, that all items MUST be sold in metric. It makes sense to the government bureaucrats, since their lives center around converting statistics in order to decide what to force you to do “for your own good”, and therefore metric is easier for them.

They can force the maid and chef to deal with day-to-day living in the inferior metric system, while they remain insulated from how real people live.

Metric is, really, the measurement system of coercion.