“Dream” would make it sound like I think it is going to happen.

I have a dream that all the automakers both domestic and foreign join together to beat the next president into the ground exposing how the economy is hampered, the public exploited, and the poor especially are made poorer, by the stupid quest for energy “independence.”

Billions of dollars are poured into corporations from taxes in order to raise corn prices and increase pollution to make ethanol. Cars become less affordable as this idiotic quest is pursued because illusion makes better government PR than does reality. After all, the economy would already go in that direction, which means there would be nothing for politicians to fix. Making up stupid self-damaging goals that no rational person would ever pursue without being loaded with misinformation, provides a rational for real government intervention. The entire discourse of our political culture on energy is to find a way to make national economic self-destruction look rational so that the government can be justified in forcing us to pursue that course, which would never happen otherwise.

I’m sorry but, duh, people already have an incentive to conserve energy. It is called the price of fuel. Anything else is just killing one’s citizens.

And, for the record, one thing that keeps you poor and unemployed is not having transportation. The more cars become out of reach, the more we will see people locked in poverty.

And automakers could, if they had the will, spell it all out.

But they won’t. They’ll run from the whip and chase the taxpayer-funded carrot and they will cave. More than that, they will promote the Presidential line of garbage by extolling their own virtues in abiding by unnecessary and destructive regulations. In this way all private industries become mouths for the public sector’s deceptions designed to glorify the public sector.

(BTW, on one issue in the news story I have to concede: I think the states should be allowed to set their own emission standards. It may be stupid, but I think they have the authority to be stupid. Hopefully prices would skyrocket in those states while people would see other states where people could still afford cars. But, in any case, forcing other people to bear the cost of your driving by poisoning their air is a different issue in principle–though I’m not sure how reliable the facts are–than myths about the need for fuel efficiency or independence, or fictions about “the greenhouse effect.”)