Thank Liberalism for the SUV…again
(caption: You can't ban powerful vehicles, any more realistically than you can ban stupidity.)
Years ago, busybodies decided to violate the limits to the powers of the Federal government, by setting gas mileage standards (and many other harmful regulations) on automobiles.
As is always the case with the Law of Unintended Consequences, this actually produced the opposite of the intended results.
It created the green-hated SUV boom.
This is because there are legitimate uses for large engines, and large vehicles. You can’t just declare that everything has to get X miles per gallon. Obviously, trash trucks cannot. The tractor-trailer rigs that deliver most of our goods cannot. Vehicles that actually are needed to drive somewhere on the road and then go off-road to do work cannot.
There are, in fact, many sporting or work activities that require the power or weight that make high gas mileage impossible.
So the bureaucrats were forced to create special exceptions…for example, a Sports-Utility Vehicle class.
But arrogant, ivory-tower civil rulers cannot anticipate all needs. OK, let’s face it, they are actually incompetent at anticipating the needs of real people.
So it didn’t occur to them that regular families need large vehicles, for many reasons. Nor that the regulations on minivans would make them too underpowered and, well, ugly, for most people to find tolerable.
So, in fact, the typical family was faced with an artificial division between the “efficient” vehicles, and those even more powerful than they need.
They were, therefore, actually driven (no pun intended) to buying from the latter class. Stuck between feeble, dangerous, ugly cars with good mileage, and inefficient, powerful, good-looking ones, they chose the latter. As they should.
It’s the environmentalists’ own fault.
And now they’re at it again:
The Obama/Pelosi administration have announced a McCain-like plan to FORCE Americans to drive even weaker, uglier, more fuel-efficient cars. This will not only increase poverty, by hugely raising the price of cars and therefore pricing people out of transportation, but will surely have many other unintended consequences, in the long run. More automaker bankruptcy, as they’re forced to make cars we won’t buy? Even crazier automotive trends, as we try to find a way to get what we actually need, instead of what they want us to have?
Have fun finding out what they’ll be.
2 Comments »
Leave a Reply to autostry Cancel reply
About
This site has its origins before the word “Blog” existed. Back then its owner, Kaz, was simply thought of as having a website that published socio-political articles with regularity…But the only real difference was that the RSS/XML protocals were not yet used this way.
The website was known as Site of the Sentient, a reference to the famous Words of the Sentient, that Kaz had been editing for years previously.
When some random portal site hijacked the domain siteofthesentient.com, it was a dark time for the human knowledge quest. Fortunately, But Now You Know is striving to take up the slack, and even has some revamped versions of the original articles, for example Conscription, is it Slavery, and How to Get Out of Jury Duty, and be a hero instead of a bad citizen.
Kaz is a writer, graphic artist, and supplements his income by being a hardcore senior web developer.
Along with this blog, you can track his efforts with the dedicated facebook page here.
Speaking of tracking:
You can follow But Now You Know here, on Twitter
And you can follow But Now You Know, via our Facebook Page, here.
Share This Article
Words of the Sentient- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Recent Comments
kazvorpal on Monkeys Don’t Kill Peopl… Jenny Brewer on Monkeys Don’t Kill Peopl… Pater Rolf Hermann L… on It’s Not Even an Effing… Upholding Integrity… on Why the End Does Not Justify t… Alf from Albany on Why Workers Dislike Union… - Pithy Pontifications
- GMOs are Safer Than “Natural” HybridsPeople try to claim that Genetically Modified Organisms, for example corn with a gene spliced in that helps it resist a disease, are somehow more dangerous, because we don’t know what other changes the splicing may have wrought. The claim is made that that they are somehow “unproven” and could contain some surprise risk, but […]
- Ron Paul is Right: Don’t Abandon What We’ve AchievedIn his recent appearance on Jay Leno, Ron Paul made it clear that we should continue the fight to reclaim the Republican party from the socialist RiNOs…not abandon it for the ever-failed Libertarian party, right when we’ve achieved so much. After the fiasco of blatant rule-violation and corruption at the Republican national convention, some Libertarian […] […]
- It’s Because OBAMA Didn’t Build AnythingObama made the headlines last week, giving a speech from which a quote has been plucked and repeated, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” This is yet another example of a quote missing the context of the speech around it. We need that context, in order to understand where Obama was coming […]
- Martha Stewart Did Nothing WrongWhat makes something good, or bad, is not whether it’s legal or banned. Anyone who disagrees can go explain it to Mr. Schindler. The difference between right and wrong, good and bad, is whether you violate another person’s property (including their body). This is the one universal “good versus evil” shared by all societies and […]
- How Green Food Causes World Hunger — Eggs“Organic” and other “Green” agriculture and food production is already widely understood to be causing food shortages, and skyrocketing food prices, worldwide, but it’s often too subtle and abstract an effect for regular people to really understand. But now we have a very stark, clear example, a crisis caused by imposing “green” techniques on everyone: […] […]
- Today, Congress Will Kill 387 PeopleNo, I don’t mean Congress will order the execution of 387 people today. I’d almost respect that more, because it’d be direct and therefore, in a sense, far more honest. But, according to a snowballing body of science, the sleep deprivation you’re suffering today because of Daylight Saving Time ends up killing hundreds of people, […]
- How Bush/Obama Create Terrorists“Look, we are AGAINST the Taliban, but if this action is repeated, we will all join the Taliban, and then these [US] forces will not be able to stay one more minute in Afghanistan.” Next time some ridiculous neocon claims Muslims become terrorists simply because they hate our “way of life”, not because of what […]
- How Government Stimulus Caused the Great Depression
- Worried about Bed Bugs? Thank the EPAYes, we all know that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of millions by malaria. But there’s something far more important to us in the US: The scourge of bed bugs has been spreading like wildfire, and they are really unpleasant. Bed bugs were pretty-much extinct in the US, by the early 1970s, killed […]
- Ron Paul in the General ElectionThere is this common myth that a “moderate” Republican — a big government interventionist — is the best choice for a general election. They are called the most “electable”…by the Big Government advocates in the media. As proof of this, we can look to how well Bob Dole and John McCain did. Conservatives compromised their principles, and […]
- GMOs are Safer Than “Natural” Hybrids
I agree. They focused too much on creating cars that could barely fit a family of three. If they keep focusing on producing more of these, they would probably end up in a lot somewhere like their predecessors. They should also focus on improving family vehicles which, I suppose, would be more useful.
To what “they” are you referring? The automakers? I’m referring to the government forcing people to buy SUVs by effectively banning any other vehicle type from being useful to families.