(FORTUNE Magazine) – Among our reasons for preferring Ronald Reagan over George Bush is that Ron knew exactly what to do when confronting the mighty metric-conversion movement: Ron squarely opposed the movement and eliminated all funding for the U.S. Metric Board. George shows no particular signs of being wild about liters, grams, and meters; still, he does have this tendency to go with the flow, and last year he signed an executive order requiring the Commerce Department to finally get with it. Among other things, the order requires federal agencies to switch to metric units in their procurement from the private sector. The argument about metrics is a bit of a litmus test. Most liberals wish to go metric, moving rapidly to an allegedly rational world in which water freezes at a temperature easy to remember (zero, in case you forgot), and many weights and measures are tidily calibrated in units of ten. Most conservatives keep stating they like the present system fine. At the policy level, the liberals wish to use U.S. government leverage to force change, repeatedly invoking the argument that America is alone in a metric world and inherently less competitive when it tries to sell soft drinks by the ounce and typing paper sized at the standard 8 1/2-by-11 inches. A thought we kept bumping into in a rich Nexis harvest of articles referring to the metric system is that only Liberia and Myanmar (formerly Burma) are with us in resisting metrics, and look where they are. The conservative answer is to state that if exporters find their customers want metric weights and sizes, then they will adapt naturally -- indeed they are doing so already -- and need no arm-twisting from Commerce. A lot of discussion about metrics assumes that the only issue is whether we describe the existing world in metric terms. Alas, it ain't that simple: If 8 1/2-by-11 typing paper goes metric, the paper size itself will surely change. Now being promoted by the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology is a size designated A4. You get to this size as follows: First, there is an A0 size with an area of one square meter and a width-length ratio of 1 to the square root of 2 (1.4142, in case you forgot). The A1 size is what you get when you fold A0 in half. Three more foldings, and you are at A4, a typing-paper size that had many a booster at a meeting last year of 60 officials from different federal agencies. In case you are wondering, it works out to 8.3 by 11.7 inches, a size already sweeping Europe and deemed to represent terrific progress. Next question: In a metric world, will there be pressure to change all the lengths and weights built into our everyday lives? George Will had a column recently wondering gloomily if sports announcers would some day be describing home runs in meters. The column drew extensive ridicule from Washington Post readers, who mostly argued that home runs could in fact be described quite readily in metric terms. We found ourselves wondering, however, about the distance between the bases, now exactly 90 feet. It is hard to believe that future generations of baseball fans will be characterizing that figure as 27.4 meters. For sure, somebody will want to change to a rounder number of meters, thereby changing the whole game. Scary, eh?

Perhaps the most immediate metric menace is a possible switch from miles to kilometers in federal highway signs. Whether the Bush executive order really requires this is unclear, but the Department of Transportation is known to be thinking about it. Even the Washington Post pronounced the new signs a rotten idea, and several Congresspersons have introduced legislation to bar action by DOT. Hey, if they get along without kilometers in Myanmar, who needs them here?