Obamacare on Wheels

Ferrari just reported a third quarter sales sales uptick of nearly 11 percent, which it attributes to demand for its V8 powered Portofino. Sales of the V12 Superfast rose 7.9 percent. The best-selling three cars in the U.S. are big trucks – the Chevy Silverado, Ford F-150 and Dodge Ram 1500. These are not being produced at bayonet-point, via mandates – and the people buying them don’t need their palms greased as inducements to buy them.

Contrast this with the sales of electric cars so far this year  – of which there were none.

A number of them did change hands, it’s true. But to describe the exchange as a “sale” is to abuse the language, akin to referring to Bruce as “her.”

Each one must be given away at a net loss. This includes most especially the Tesla3, which the company falsely proclaims is “selling” well. Tesla is taking in money, perhaps. In the manner of Tony Soprano.

But it is not making money selling cars.

Not if you exclude the money paid to Tesla by its enforcer, the government – or the money which others are forced to pay the government but which the government so generously exempts Tesla from paying. These latter – the various “tax breaks” received by the “buyers” of Teslas and other EVs – are considered by some to be innocuous, even desirable because (so the argument goes) the government is simply refraining from taking.

The problem is that the government still takes from others and by doing that – but not doing it to others – the government is advantaging the one at the expense of the other. It is analogous to your neighbor being exempted from being forced to pay the property tax on his home. Meanwhile, you have to pay – and probably pay a bit more – in order to make up the shortfall.

Your neighbor gets to build an addition to his place.

It is hard to divine the full extent of the EV’s plugging-in to other people’s pockets, but we can get a general idea:

“Zero emissions”/Carbon Credits – This is a payment made by a manufacturer of standard cars to the manufacturer of electric cars in order to avoid having to actually make electric cars. The buyer gets credit for not making them  . . . in exchange for cash.

It is an extorted payment, made under duress, to comply with “zero emissions” production mandates, which require every company selling cars in that state to sell a certain number of “zero emissions” electric cars or else be denied permission to sell any cars whatsoever in that state.

California has had such a mandate in place for years and it has been used by  Tesla to subsidize its otherwise not-viable business with the money earned by viable businesses. If the carbon credit system did not exist, Tesla would probably not exist – or would have folded years ago.

Sales of non-electric cars have been subsidizing the development of EVs via nonconsensual wealth transfers – which are fundamentally mo different than the way Obamacare mulcts the young, healthy and responsible for the benefit of the old, sick and irresponsible.

CAFE – The government has been decreeing that vehicles must average “X” miles-per-gallon since the 1970s, which has distorted the car market in numerous ways most people are unaware of.

CAFE – rather than changing market tastes – caused the extinction of the large, rear-wheel-drive sedans and wagons with big V8s that were commonly bought by average people pre-CAFE. These were reincarnated in the form of large, V8 SUVs (which for a time were held to a much lower CAFE standard; this provided an end-run around the CAFE mandate in favor of the market).

CAFE also subsidizes EVs – by imposing another de facto production mandate.

Since electric cars use no gas, there is an artificial, at-gunpoint incentive (CAFE is not a voluntary program) to add more EVs to the lineup, in order to bump up the overall average mileage of the company’s lineup of vehicles.

The real reason for the otherwise inexplicable announcements by so many car companies that they will shortly be adding EVs to their lineups is not because of market demand but because they feel the tip of the CAFE bayonet in the small of their backs.

The mandatory minimum which each car company’s fleet was required to average increased slowly and incrementally for decades  – until recently.

In the last year of the Obama presidency, a fatwa – a decree handed down by a federal bureaucracy – announced that the current standard would be almost doubled to 50-plus MPG by the mid 2020s.

There is no known way to achieve compliance with such a standard without lots of EVs. And this is one of the main reasons for the sudden “commitment” to EVs.

This time, the subsidization of EVs will come directly from the buyers – whose choices are being artificially and coercively winnowed down to only EVs – or a diminishing number of non-EVs, the prices of which will become exorbitant via federal fines and price-padding by their manufacturers, to offset the losses incurred by the artificial tide of EVs.

IC No-Go Zones – In Europe, which is a big market and also the home market of several major brands such as VW/Audi, BMW and Mercedes (as well as Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo) laws have been passed forbidding the use of non-electric cars in certain areas, such as downtown areas of cities – rendering cars which are not electric cars essentially useless to their owners.

This is another legislated inducement that favors EVs using force – by forcing people to not use (or buy) cars which aren’t electric. It is also another means by which EVs are subsidized – at gunpoint – via the offices of government. People are forced to either buy the EV – which costs substantially more than an IC-engined car – or pay more for the remaining non-IC cars, which are used to subsidize the EVs.

While the U.S. hasn’t yet got IC No-Go Zones, the odds are high that they will appear in Leftward-controlled areas such as CA and even if they don’t, the fact that they already exist in Europe – where all those major brands are headquartered – effectively forces those manufacturers to build the EVs and attempt to “sell” them everywhere – including here.

Consider it Obamacare on wheels.

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