If “alternative” and “zero emissions” cars are such a great idea, why is it necessary to prop them up with endless federal subsidies?
Get ready for more of that.
Senators from auto manufacturing states are trying again to pass legislation designed to “encourage investment in zero-emissions vehicles and advanced fuel-reduction and safety technologies.”
Might as well encourage digging – and then refilling – holes in the back yard. It works out pretty much the same.
During the last session of Congress, the Senate approved something titled the Vehicle Innovation Act as part of a broader energy bill. The energy package died when the House and Senate could not reconcile separate versions of the bill.
“Michigan and the United States are leading the way in developing innovative technologies that will make the next-generation of cars and trucks safer and more efficient than ever before,” Sen. Gary Peters (D, MI) the bill’s lead author, said in a statement. “This bipartisan bill will help ensure that American manufacturers remain internationally competitive by encouraging the development of cutting-edge vehicle technologies that improve fuel efficiency, save consumers money and help support American jobs.”
The bill provides for the fleecing of taxpayers to “support” the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office, which issues grants and promotes public-private partnerships in basic and applied research for technologies that improve fuel efficiency of light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.
It also “encourages” the office to coordinate activities with other department offices and outside agencies engaged in similar research.
Examples of potential fuel-saving but cost-adding technologies include engine downspeeding – using a computer to cut engine RPM at highway cruising speeds, to reduce friction and increase fuel efficiency – as well as the usual boondoggled: electric vehicle charging, hydrogen and natural gas refueling, aerodynamics and lightweight materials.
The legislation authorizes the Vehicle Technologies Office to be funded at $313.6 million in fiscal year 2018, up from $307 million in 2017, with annual increases of four percent each year through 2022.
Other politicians who think it’s okay to steal your money and spend it on these boondoggles are: Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D, MI), and Lamar Alexander (R, TN) who co-sponsored the Vehicle Innovation Act.
“Automakers are focused on the deployment of advanced technology and alternative fuel vehicles to help address our nation’s energy security and environmental concerns,” Mitch Bainwol, CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said in a statement. “The next generation of fuel-efficient technologies requires significant investments in research, design, development, testing and certification as they are developed and refined for use on the various types of vehicles needed by American consumers. This legislation will help ensure that our industry partners throughout the vast automotive supply chain are supported in the research on and development of these advanced technologies.”
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In an anarcho-communal society, your property and capital is whatever you successfully wall off from others.
You can You can defend your 16 acres yourself, or enlist neighbors in a pact of mutual aid.
There is no title or registrar of title. No platte maps. You and your villagers know who owns what. There is no outside authority or recourse to outside third parties.
You are the law. You and your fellows back each other with defensive tools and reputation.
This was the agrarian system of Christian Europe.
It is actually the capitalists who robbed and plundered the communalists.
The churchlands that were seized by militarists. Militaries that were paid by capitalists.
I would say communism has helped some of the worst situations improve.
Russian peasants rose from slavery to mass plunder. Most of them were better off than before.
Chinese peasants used to face starvation each winter. Their meritocracy of plunder is now an engine of prosperity for the world.
Southern blacks and landless whites would have fared better under communism than they did with northern invasion and owner class replacement.
Africa and the Middle East would be better off under communism than tribalism and islamism.
Capitalism is something that emerges amid prosperity.
A few single capitalists amid hordes of unskilled poor don’t always bring free market enrichment. Sometimes they enable totalitarian enslavement.
I’m not pro ancom. I’m pointing out its appeal and merits to those far down the ladder of progress from us.
Of course its destructive and unproductive from our perspective. But for complete shitholes, I can see why they consider it.
Ancoms believe in personal property but not private property. You own what you occupy and personally use.
A business with no onsite owner becomes workers property.
No inanimate object can have authority over a human. Thus no money. No badges. No written laws. No signs. No advertising.
It’s flaw is fighting fiat with fiat.
Like post Weimar Germany fighting International Banks and International Plunder Pacts.
Adolf Hitler – The Man Who Fought the Banks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9D_z2xS4GI
Hi Tor,
This makes no sense to me. Without property, you own nothing – including yourself.
Because if someone can simply take what I create, what I earn, then they are taking me. Which is another way os saying they own me.
Liberty without property rights is impossible. It means perpetual insecurity of every person, who becomes the property of other persons.
The whole idea of liberty is that you are free. This must include that you are free to not have the work product of your mind and body taken by others. Indeed, for liberty to be possible, others must respect that they have no right to the work product of your mind and body, unless freely given or given in return for something of value to he who created it.
Communism is unworkable because it is premised on the impossible idea that everyone has equal talent, equal drive and equal propriety; that all will contribute equally – and receive equally. This is imbecilic. In practice, communism means the enslavement of the productive and bright to the not-productive and not-bright; the industrious to the indolent.
The maggots and predators take over.
It is a fact of life that manna (whether housing or health care or food) does not fall from heaven. It must be worked for, earned. To say that people have a “right” to take that which others have earned and worked for is morally repulsive.
I listened to the most recent Joe Rogan podcast with Jordan Peterson the other day and one line came up in it that all this SJW/lefist/commie stuff comes from a hate of competency. The hatred of a hierarchy not based on power. It is a better or at least more concise way of expressing what I have long said about everything being pushed into politics to remove competency as a requirement. To break the link between hard work with success. Success becomes a matter of who a person knows instead of what he knows. The masses like this because it appeals to their laziness and incompetency. Their prioritization of the social over the technical.
Unless there is collapse of this system or it comes to its senses there we are probably going to see physical coercion in some way, likely indirect, in the coming decades to force men to work, especially competent men. The experts are now pushing for this universal basic income thing. They say it will free people to pursue their non-economically rewarding or income risky dreams. And my retort is well who does the work then? Who cleans the sewers? This civilization is short lived without the Ed Nortons and countless other dirty jobs that get done because they need to be done and people pay for it. Almost all of them are not something people dream of doing, they do it because they are paid to do it. They may grow to even like it (cue Mike Rowe), but nobody is going to get off their ass and do it if they are paid to sit on their ass.
Come to think of it, we already see the coercion. My number one expense is taxes. Without property, income, and payroll taxes I probably could be following my passions instead of working. Having earned my way to that reward.
I makes my blood boil the nerve of these parasites. Almost to the point where I want to walk away, sit back, and watch civilization implode from their stupid ideas.
Not that I support the Vehicle Innovation Act at all, but it is targeted, like all legislation, to the usual crowd of financial-sink-holes. To qualify, one must produce, or promise to produce, “conventional” transportation doing unconventional things. One of the most likely producers to actually affect things, Elio, is not eligible. Kind of an Animal Farm thing of “Four wheels good, three wheels bad”.
Producing a vehicle which uses less resources in manufacturing, and uses less “fossil fuel”, fewer consumables, and even reduces wear and tear on highways just does not fit the “big picture” Besides that, how many millionaires would line up to buy an Elio?
As far as I can tell, the only thing holding back production-runs at Elio is a lack of cash to proceed. I am proud to see that they continue to press on in spite of all the difficulties they have already overcome.
4. The products of labour -food, clothing, housing, and everything else that is useful- all are the common possessions of society – Every one may use them freely, and everyone will enjoy all wealth in common.
5 . There will not be any kind of government. Whether central or local, all government organizations will be abolished.
6. There will be no armies, police, or jails.
7. There will be no laws or rules.
WHAT IS THE ANARCHIST-COMMUNIST PARTY?
https://libcom.org/library/goals-methods-anarchist-communist-party-1914