President Obama is acting quickly to toughen tailpipe emissions and CAFE mileage standards on the auto industry:
Once the agencies act, automobile manufacturers will quickly have to retool to begin producing and selling cars and trucks that are cleaner and get better gas mileage on an accelerated schedule. The auto companies have lobbied hard against the regulations and have challenged them in court.
Detroit automakers are on the hook for tens of billions of bailout bucks — what are they going to do, complain?
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, in the modern welfare state, once you take the Danegeld, you’ll never be rid of the Dane.
The problem in this plan can be seen in how fuel is currently refined. The problem today with fuel standards being set by states can be seen in a supply system where we have 50 ’boutique’ standards for fuel. It makes gas more expensive for everyone at every level and it puts more power in the hands of small state political parties.
With this approach to cars, we are going to have state political parties trying to out do each other for the title of “most stringent fuel efficiency standards”. The result of this plan isnt a more efficient system to help manufacturers or consumers, but a broken and horribly inefficient system – which helps one and only one group,
The political class, and they will be more than willing to help you with your problem ( for a modest fee of course).
Imagine if state political parties set standards for computers. Just try to imagine how many different versions of USB memory sticks there would be, all in the name of ‘progress’.
Well, considering how many different versions of Vista are available, it seems like Microsoft may very well have been anticipating just that.
Yes, by all means let us have 50 different automobile standards. That’ll keep the number of cars made real low & real expensive, so that the masses will no longer have cars. Only our betters will have them.
On the bright side, at least it’s not a operations–I mean gas–tax. Sure it reduces economic activity, but at least it doesn’t also decrease the productivity of existing economic activity, like has happened with the rise in gas prices.