If there's anything a government bureaucrat hates more than the unhampered market, it's the automobile. He'll do anything to take it away from people, though of course he'll couch his true intentions in euphemistic banalities about "cleaning up the air."
Yet despite aggressive marketing and loads of free PR, neither Honda nor Chevrolet (which sells the Geo line) could give these pint-sized Edsels away. It turn out that the views of the fuel-efficiency killjoys and the general population sharply diverge.
The 1996 blizzard dumped three feet of snow on the Washington, D.C., area. The event proved once again that statist economists, armed with their "market failure" theories, perceive reality exactly the opposite from the way it is. It is government, not the free market, that is inherently plagued with inefficiency, fraud, and corruption. Private property and competitive markets provide citizens with the superior alternative—not the other way around.
Randall Holcombe identifies a paradoxical feature of much public argument about economic issues. Socialism has collapsed. The Workers Paradise is no more, and even professed socialists rush to proclaim their allegiance to the market.
The pattern is all-too-familiar: Congress and its bureaus of executive-branch henchmen arrogantly mock the Constitution, only to be applauded by the courts. Nowhere is this pattern more evident than the recent case of Leslie Salt Co. vs. the United States. Here are the facts.
Recycling has a high moral status, mostly because kids come home with bad information from schools and, in turn, use it to intimidate their parents. One poll revealed that 63% of kids have told Mom or Dad to recycle.
Parents, be ashamed no more! Throw that trash away.
My aunt in Massachusetts, who's never had much interest in politics, is now a land-rights activist. Bureaucrats hounded her for months, insisting that her small plot is a wetland "protected" under federal law, and demanding that she repent of the high crime of planting a garden on her own property. Now the swelling anti-government citizens' army has another soldier.
A gasoline-powered truck just towed an electric Ecostar out of my driveway. Built by Ford Motor Co. under pressure from the federal government, the "state-of-the-art" vehicle was loaned to me for the day. It was supposed to recharge overnight, but the lights on the panel display, flashing wildly, said it would not.
If you thought the end of the Cold War would mean the death of "defense" socialism, or even the shrinking of the massive Pentagon bureaucracy that has been choking off and diverting the productive sector of the economy since World War II, then think again.
Eco-socialists have to find some way to "Sustainable foist their ideas on the public. The term "socialism" doesn't sell anymore, but there are proxies. One is "sustainable development."
