The Left continues to try and redefine our common language out from underneath us in order to push an Agenda. In this case, it’s about getting us to stop driving and to rely upon on the Government to provide transport.
Take gas cars off the road (or ALL cars, for that matter) and GAIA lives again!
The flip side is that by taking that option off the table, slowly and incrementally, anti-Freedom activists give Government the ability to construct the Big Red Button that can stop us dead in our tracks anytime that they want.
What, you don’t think if given the chance, that Biden wouldn’t push it at the extreme urging of the eco-socialists and New Urbanists in his administration? It is they who insist that higher gas prices are GOOD for the rest of us.
Secretary of Transportation Petey Buttigieg, SpoxFlacker Jen Psaki, and Dementia Joe have all said that if you’d just buy more expensive electric cars and give up your “gas guzzler,” it would be better for you in the long run – no gas hikes for you!
Yeah, and I just opened my electric bill. What should have been (historically) $85 a month (on average) has turned out to be over $125. Less energy used, a 50% increase.
Thanks, Brandon, for your energy policies.
So what would that have been if I was charging a car at the same time?
Stop gaslighting me. I believe my “lyin’ eyes” and smaller bank account more than I do in your bloviating nonsense. But (too often, it seems), I digress.
Once again, Treehugger shows us that the Left has no problem rearranging the deck chairs so that WE end up “in the drink” before them. Lloyd (who hates ALL cars and pickups) came out with a post title that gives the game away:
Gas Is Too Cheap
High gasoline prices encourage alternatives and are better for public health.
And he goes on and on. He’s all in on higher gas prices. Not because the actual marketplace can’t deliver sufficient product at the prices want to pay. Nay, constraining the supply is a way to achieve political agenda items (bolded)
As Joe Cortright of City Observatory notes: “These higher fuel prices prompt people and businesses to make different decisions: people drive more efficient vehicles, drive fewer miles, and kill and maim fewer of their brothers and sisters in crashes. Cheap gas is a principal reason for America’s excessive greenhouse gas emissions and the epidemic of traffic violence. Higher priced gasoline prompts businesses and consumers to make choices and investment decisions that lower our fossil fuel emissions. Higher gas prices make electric vehicles more competitive, and prompt people to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. Higher gas prices also discourage long commutes and make transit more attractive.”
Got all that? Higher gas prices are the leverage that Progressive controlled Government use to achieve their goals. And in Lloyd’s writings, it’s clear that the end goal brings back the old Agenda 21 goal of a decade ago of “rack’em and stack’em” cities, as Lloyd puts it, that are walkable. You’ll enjoy your neighbors more, a more friendly environment. But you’ll have to make due with smaller apartments and higher expense; for him, that’s an acceptable collateral damage – who cares if you end up in an environment like the South side of Chicago with all the violence.
Sidenote: notice the creeping usage of “violence” is now being applied to traffic? Is there NOTHING that simply adding the word “violence” to a situation can be translated to “and Government has to and CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!”. Right – Government is how Chicago came to and stay violent, too.
So, before I forget, let’s bring in the DISQUS comments. First, a marketplace is defined as:
the free and voluntary exchange of goods between two people. When such a transaction occurs, both the seller and buyer believe they have walked away possessing “higher value” than they had before.
(H/T: the Skip Dictionary). So, here comes Vin60 with the grand pronouncement of that people respond to pricing signals in the market. Emphasis, reformatting by me.:
Many of the comments here are missing the point of the article, which is that people respond to economic signals, which is what makes a market. Conservatives don’t typically argue to solve high gas prices by artificially depressing them. That’s the banana-republic thinking of populists, not conservatives.
National commitments on carbon reduction are real. How to get there is a serious business. People are going to take stock of their choices when they see prices going up, and the price signals are healthy. Paying more now to lower their carbon footprint will help them avoid paying obscenely more later due to unstoppable global heating.
Note that he completely forgets, for the sake of intellectual dishonesty, the WHY prices will go up. And completely fails to name the Actor (the WHO) that is making them go up. Nor is he explicit as to the WHAT, either. In all of the bolded cases above, it’s the half truth. The goal is to force people to do with less. To make that happen, Progressives “capture” Government’s to FORCE change that people otherwise wouldn’t do. It’s the old Cass Sustein “nudge” technique. Vin60’s religious viewpoint demands that we all suffer so he turns to the “only thing we all belong to” and has it club us with policies, regulations, and laws that constrain energy such that we all have to do what they demand.
When Government deliberately distorts a market, it no longer is a free marketplace in which people are making rational decisions based on their self-interests of needs and wants.
Coercion by deliberate Government manipulation of those economic signals means that people are no longer making the decisions; those decisions are being taking away from them.
It is Government co-opting the marketplace for its own purposes. It is effectively no different than if Government did something directly (like Government schools indoctrinating your children while making you believe YOUR children really belong to them – you just get in the way of raising them). But as long as the Left can control something to make what they want happen (versus people having the freedom to decide for themselves), they’ll do it if they believe they can get away with it until people actually believe this co-option is “normal”.
Then, they smile. And Vin60 is working toward that smile:
The poor will suffer far more from climate change than the rich. You can protect the poor by subsidizing their rising cost of heat, light, and housing as the climate gets weirder. Redistributive taxes will do the job. It won’t reduce carbon emissions or lower costs though, and it seems like a tough sell politically.
Or you can protect the poor by protecting the climate. You’d also be reducing the cost of living for future generations. A more stable climate would also support a more stable political system where everybody wins, especially the poor.
Sorry, humans can’t control the climate and that is the biggest of the hubris filled ideas they have. They can’t but certainly have the egos to think they can pull it off. Our friend, Vindaloo Bugaboo goes after the economic illiteracy part:
You can protect the poor by subsidizing their rising cost of heat, light, and housing
No you can’t. Money doesn’t grow on trees, and the whole point of degrowth is to redistribute wealth from richer nations to poorer ones. Where do the subsidies come from when we keep going further and further into debt to fund our addiction to entitlements?
Given that 54% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, with 21% simply struggling to pay their bills, why is the focus on the poor when it’s the middle class that supports government’s give-away programs?
I chipped in:
You’d also be reducing the cost of living for future generations
Economic illiteracy. The cost of living is what it is. All you’re suggesting is forcing others to subsidize it.
Admitting to that last part proves the truth of what I say. It also gives the game away. Benjamin Franklin was right when he said this:
A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury
Methinks that a lot of Western Societies are well along that road…at which point, NO one will be able to do anything about climate change / cooling / warming / chaos / emergency.
And they think we can actually afford all this spending?
Remember when Bush II signed the Light Bulb Efficiency into Law? It effectively got rid of incandescent lightbulbs – and then Obama put the pedal to the metal on it. Pay a higher price NOW for your Compact Fluorescent Lights but safe over the long haul. Then it was buy those expensive LEDs and really save over 10/20 years.
Yeah, and then the price of electricity went up that countermanded those “savings”. And just ask Californians with all those Teslas and Priuses how it felt to charge them up when the power companies shut down the electric lines because of the environment (wildfires)?
Sure, EV car prices may well come down. But historically, it has turned out to be a hammer / anvil situation with us in the middle of those two. Whether it is filling our cars (if we are allowed to have such, directly or indirectly), it won’t matter if it is gas or electric – they’ll make sure we can’t afford it.
You see, their ideology trumps our Freedoms.
