The best primer I've seen for the utter stupidity of "command economies"--in this case EVs

Okay, young Americans, what's a "free market"?  

It's where governments don't get involved, don't award billions of dollars in corrupt grants to companies run by the ruler's brother-in-law.  Instead millions of individuals, freely choosing what's best for them, end up making far better decisions, finding the best ideas as if by magic.

For young Americans, that basic theory was explained by a guy named Adam Smith way back in 1759.  He called it "the invisible hand of the marketplace," claiming that a million individuals, working solely for their own best interests, will always produce better results than a dozen bureaucrats devising policies which are then ORDERED by the ruler.

That last is called a "command economy."

The "electric vehicle" offers a classic case study in the utter stupidity of a "command economy."

Every president and PM of a western nation positively slobbered to jump on the bandwagon for those faaabulous electric vehicles, eh?  The pols didn't know jack about the science, but their corrupt advisors said "Dis guud," and that was the end of it.

See, supporting EV's won the ruling pols votes from the wokiez on the Left, and from "watermelons" (fake environmentalists--green on the outside, red on the inside).  So what's not to love, eh?

And underlying it was the Global Warming scam: the communists (and yes, we know who they are at the U.N.) had convinced scientists that global warming was caused by CO2, emitted by burning carbon-based fuels (like gasoline).  The watermelons convinced western pols only that the only way to save life on Earth was to end the use of carbon fuels--though oddly, only in western nations.

(Keep that in mind cuz it will show up later.)

The pols ORDERED that billions and billions of dollars (and francs and deutsche marks and so on) be given to companies that promised to make EVs.  And having so ordered, they congratulated themselves on being woke, and took vacations.

So how'd that work out?

In virtually every nation except China the dream of electric vehicles is unraveling – and offers yet another example of why "command economies," run by bureaucrats and pols, never work.

"Scientists" in both government and academia told the pols global warming was a huge threat to life on Earth, and that the pols needed to order an end to the use of oil and gas.  That meant supporting electric vehicle development.  And socialist economists assured the pols that supporting EVs would ensure that their country could compete in the undoubtedly huge market for electric vehicles.  

You won't be surprised to learn that *every* western pol eagerly jumped on board.  Of course governments would have to commit a few tens of billions of dollars to make it happen, but that was perfectly reasonable, said the socialists, and would repay that so-called "investment" many times over.

The lure was irrestible--and no one with any influence tried to resist.

What was carefully never mentioned was that the supplier of almost all the lithium needed for the thousand to 4,000 pounds of batteries needed per vehicle came from one nation.  Care to guess?  Sure.  Joe's paymasters, China.  Hmmm...

So how'd that "command decision"--imposed by the ruling class--work out, eh?

Initially it seemed to be a huge wokie success: The Democrat-run Mainstream Media wrote literally thousands of fawning, slobbering articles about how utterly faaabulous the things were.  And of course the wealthy signaled their own great virtue by buying 'em, as did not-so-rich people who always have to have the newest cool thing.

And yet now there are tens of thousands of EVs sitting on dealer's lots that no one is buying.  Car companies kept making 'em because the biden regime paid tax dollars to the builders to subsidize their costs to buyers, and still not many of the things sold.

Car makers dropped the price to the point of making no profit--and still the things didn't sell.

So last week Volvo announced it was getting out of the EVs business.

The company's stock rose 8% overnight.

Eager to demonstrate its faabulous wokeness (like all big companies), rental-car giant Hertz bought--to great liberal praise and acclaim 20,000 EVs in the last three years.  Now it's selling all of 'em and replacing them with gas-powered cars.  

Major car makers are pulling way back--except for China, which can make the things for a lot less than any other country.  Hmmm...

When the dust settles, the result to most nations will be hundreds of billions of dollars of government money (tax dollars) totally wasted.

There is a huge, critical lesson in all this: Governments usually make terrible economic decisions.  "Command economies" are horribly inefficient compared to free markets--as a smart guy showed way back in 1759.  And the waste of hundreds of billions of dollars in the commanded push by all governments into EVs is a textbook example of this principle.

No one really knows what products people are likely to want in five or ten years, which is why a rational government would leave it to private companies and investors to make their own bets, reap the rewards when they get it right, and bear the losses when they don’t.  That leaves governments free to use public funds on more useful things, like pushing "pride month" or ordering schools to let boys compete in girls' sports.  (Yes, that's sarcasm.)

Government subsidies distort markets and support bad decisions, wasting billions.  The problem is that after the government ORDERS a few billion dollars given away to subsidize a new EV factory, if it begins to look like that business is failing, the pols and advisors and dumb cabinet ministers (Jennifer Granholm comes to mind) always refuse to admit they made a stupid decision, so they dump more taxpayer money into the failing business.

Always.  The first principle of politics is "Never admit you made a mistake."

And of course the unions push to keep factories open even if their product isn't selling, to keep union jobs.  Politicians--eager for union votes--sign laws or orders giving more billions to keep the thing open.  It’s a vicious cycle, and once it starts it's almost impossible to stop.

And of course none of this would have happened if the watermelons hadn't screamed endlessly that carbon dioxide was fatally warming the Erf.  Which, as you may have read in this blog, is utter horse-shit.

So...amazing how the EV mania worked out, eh?  China reaped trillions in battery sales to western car makers, while all western nations spent billions subsidizing EVs while killing their oil and gas industries (i.e. low-cost energy) and subsidizing unreliable "renewables" (i.e. "green new deals").

...proving yet again that command economies waste billions, while free markets let investors decide to risk their own money. 

In fairness, I didn't come up with that.  That was Adam Smith in 1759.  Of course you knew that, cuz you went to a public K-12 skool and they taught useful stuff like that.

Well, unless you graduated after 1980, in which case they'd already replaced most of the useful, necessary stuff with wokie bullshit.

Until 2008 or so this was a great country.  Even today most of the people are still hard-working, honest and moral.  Unfortunately today we're ruled by people who are utterly corrupt, dishonest, unethical and immoral.  I'll leave it to the "woke" liberals at the NY Times, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC and the alphabets to predict how well that'll work out.

Be sure to vote in November.