The end of the automobile age
Not too long ago, I wrote a commentary titled “Why Liberals Hate Us.” I referred to a column written by Brock Yates, published years ago in Car and Driver magazine. In his column, Yates cited some other writers, who said that the automobile represented one of the last bastions of unregulated freedom. And that’s why liberals have always hated cars. They resent ordinary Americans who derive such pleasure from driving, collecting, restoring, and hot-rodding their favorite cars. Since the late ’60s and through the ’70s, the car haters sought to regulate the automobile and anything connected with the industry.
So, they made seat belts, air bags, ignition interlock switches and 5-MPH bumpers mandatory equipment on all autos sold in America. While countries such as Germany had brilliantly engineered autobahns, superior driver training, and high driving speeds, the liberals here decided we should crawl down the road at 55 miles per hour. We have also been taxed like the colonists were under King George. We pay more in gasoline taxes than the actual cost of the fuel. We have to pay sales tax every time we buy a used car, much less a new one. Every year, it seems like we pay more and more for our car registration fees and driving license fees. All of this is done because liberals hate us and our cars.
Now, in 2009, we have a President who is just as eager to dump on the auto industry as the rest of the liberals in Congress. With the perfect storm of high oil prices in 2008, a collapse of domestic car sales, and an economic crisis, the Obama administration gets what other Democrats before him could only dream of. He now has the opportunity to dictate to the car companies exactly what kind of cars they can make, and how to make them.
This is confirmed by a recent report made public by the Environmental Protection Agency. As reported by Yahoo!, the EPA has concluded that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases are a major hazard to Americans’ health. “In both magnitude and probability, climate change is an enormous problem (and) the greenhouse gases that are responsible for it endanger public health and welfare,” said the EPA. It was the first time the federal government had said it was ready to use the Clean Air Act to require power plants, cars and trucks to curtail their release of climate-changing pollution, especially carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
This opens the door very wide for Congress, especially the car-hating liberals, to regulate the automobile right out of our lives. Pay attention to the following quotes: It’s “a wake-up call for Congress” — deal with it directly through legislation or let the EPA regulate, said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate committee dealing with climate legislation. If Congress doesn’t move, Boxer said she would press EPA to take swift action. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., whose House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hopes to craft legislation in the coming weeks, called the EPA action “a game changer.” “It now changes the playing field with respect to legislation. It’s now no longer doing a bill or doing nothing. It is now a choice between regulation and legislation,” said Markey.
For years, the liberals have been trying to convince us how bad the automobile has been, and how we are guilty for loving such terrible contraptions. Never mind that cars sold in California, for example, have been practically emission-free for years. The liberals have been trying to stigmatize the automobile for a long time, the same way they demonize tobacco and firearms. They are getting set to take it all away.
The Investor’s Business Daily recently quoted Czech President Vaclav Klaus in an editorial piece. Klaus said “As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism.” Klaus told the Cato Institute that “environmentalism is a religion” that accepts global warming on faith and seeks to exploit it to reshape the world and economic social order.
I couldn’t agree more.
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