In a single argument in favor of government subsidies and mandates for electric vehicles, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg evinced a vast lack of logic that, alas, is all too typical from the political Left.
The logic stems from a willful refusal to distinguish between free-market demand and government compulsion.
First, the background: In an April 2 interview, Fox News host John Roberts cited a major drop in EV sales by Tesla and massive layoffs at Ford’s EV truck plant as a prelude to asking why the Biden administration is throwing so much taxpayer money at EVs while issuing mandates for their sales and use. Indeed, Roberts could have cited numerous other statistics and reports troubling the EV industry.
Buttigieg, whose record as a mediocre mayor of a small town combined with his embarrassing Cabinet performance hasn’t dimmed his self-assurance at all, insisted that leftist government commissars are right: “The automotive sector is moving to EVs, and we can’t pretend otherwise.” This is true only in the sense that with taxpayer subsidies enticing them and government mandates threatening them, automakers and feeder industries have made big investments in EV production. In the past six months, though, they have regretted those investments, shutting down plants or production lines all across the country.
Buttigieg’s astonishingly ludicrous remark, though, came after his boilerplate about where the automotive sector is moving.
“Sometimes, when these debates happen,” he said, “I feel like it’s the early 2000s, and I’m talking to some people who think that we can just have landline phones forever.” Later, he compared EVs to the market for regular automobiles in the 1910s.
What?!?
On phones, Buttigieg is comparing apples (or eventually Apples) to vehicles the public considers to be lemons. And he’s comparing an organically developed market for cellphones with an EV market that still barely exists despite hugely costly government attempts to create one artificially.
The government didn’t spend the 1980s and 1990s giving massive taxpayer subsidies to cellphone manufacturers. Cell towers were built by private companies with no government help. When “car phones” first appeared, the public of its own free will, enticed by their convenience and mobility, demanded more and more of them, even at comparatively high prices. And no bureaucrat or president issued orders that landline production must be phased out. Landlines are fading away because consumers have chosen to abandon them, without the nanny state bossing the consumers around.
Likewise with automobiles in the 1910s: They became popular without any government handouts, and without the government ordering that sales of horse-drawn buggies be limited.
EVs, contrarily, aren’t proving popular. Sales repeatedly fall behind government projections. The cars take far, far too long to charge and often won’t charge at all in cold weather. And they save far less power or carbon emissions than the Left likes to admit while requiring big batteries composed of minerals whose mining causes its own significant environmental problems, while giving profits and strategic advantages to foreign adversaries such as China.
Meanwhile, as Buttigieg and President Joe Biden continue, in Roberts’s words, “to shove [EVs] down consumers’ throats,” people are gagging at the EVs while, by choice, bolstering the market for gas-electric hybrid vehicles. Hybrids provide almost as many environmental benefits (emissions) while creating fewer environmental hazards (mineral mining) at a comparable or better cost, without major government subsidies or mandates, while providing far, far better convenience.
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And that’s not to mention the strain that pure EVs will put on the nation’s already strained electric grid.
Alas, the Left loves command and control. Instead, government meddlers such as Buttigieg should just get out of the way.