By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
The 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1919, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors in the United States, effective one year hence.
In the year between ratification and implementation of Prohibition, imagine if existing breweries, vinyards, or distillers had sought loans from local banks, to expand their operations. The bankers would rightly have refused, saying “We’re sorry, but your business model is collapsing; we can’t invest in you, it just wouldn’t make sense.”
We know, with the advantage of history, that Prohibition was repealed a dozen years later, but they had no way of knowing that then. It’s incredibly difficult to ratify a Constitutional amendment, and none had ever been repealed. As far as anyone knew in 1919, the business model of the entire liquor business was dead.
Of course, the federal government did not then have the power to pass out taxpayer-funded gifts, grants, and loans to politicians’ friends, but if they had, just imagine what politicians might have done for the brewers, winemakers and distillers in their social circles or donors’ lists, while they still controlled the public purse strings.
But they didn’t. Not then.
Sadly, things have changed.
Comparing the electric vehicle market of today with the liquor business of a century ago is admittedly an imperfect analogy. It is still legal to manufacture, sell and transport electric vehicles, and there’s no reason to think they’ll be banned.
However, unlike the liquor business of a century ago, the lion’s share of the electric vehicle market is built on state and federal regulations, and on taxpayer-funded subsidies for both manufacturers and buyers.
These regulations and subsidies all have their root in a mass delusion – the “climate change” hoax – which has been fully exposed as an utter fraud. Both the popularity amongst car-buyers and the massive thumb on the scale of auto-manufacturing by government regulators have been based on the misguided belief that driving EVs will help save the planet from a nonexistent risk posed by carbon dioxide. Both the feds in Washington and a number of state capitols have attacked the world’s manufacturers of traditional gasoline or diesel powered vehicles, to force them into production of EVs instead.
Today, having thoroughly crippled the ability of manufacturers to legally and affordably make and sell internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, trucks, SUVs and vans, the American people are realizing their errors and turning back to the kinds of vehicles that have served the world successfully for over a hundred years.
The positives of good EVs like Tesla, such as a smooth ride, reduced maintenance, and often incredible handling are undeniable. But at the same time, the many negatives of EVs are now much better-known than before: their batteries’ vulnerabilities, their painfully limited range and charging challenges, their high cost, their challenges in bad weather, their propensity toward unextinguishable fires, the cost of battery replacement, the environmental horror of the mining of rare earth minerals for their batteries, the inability of the power grid to ever support them en masse, and of course, the fact that their very raison d’etre – the fear of global warming – has been exposed as a scam.
And the incoming Trump administration, well aware of the above, intends to take the government’s thumb off the scale in every way. We expect Trump II to drop the CAFÉ standards back to a rational level, remove the federal subsidies on the manufacture and sale of EVs, kill the idiotic federal commitments to build an archipelago of federally-funded charging stations from coast to coast, and restore America’s energy dominance by empowering the petroleum industry to again fully meet the needs of the transportation arena without a fear that petrol was going the way of the dodo, as the Left has long claimed.
There will likely always be a market for the best of the EVs; Tesla for example will thrive as a niche player. But the age of EVs “on the ascendant” is clearly over.
And as the Biden regime prepares to vacate the executive branch, they are doing what nobody in the private sector would dream of: they are pretending not to see this reality, and pouring as many taxpayer dollars as possible into the incinerator of the “green energy” arena.
On Monday, November 25, for example, three weeks after the new energy reality was delivered in a landslide, the Biden Department of Energy announced a $6.6 billion set of loan guarantees for Rivian, an American EV maker currently operating in Irvine, California and Normal, Illinois that dreams of scaling up with a bigger plant in suburban Atlanta, Georgia.
Nothing against Rivian, of course; it appears to make fine automobiles. But the bloom is off the rose of EVs, and only the strongest (such as Tesla) will survive. Rivian, which lost a whopping five and a half billion dollars last year, is not likely to make it. If private banks won’t bet on them, there’s no justification for the government to do so.
This isn’t the only such story in the news these days, though Rivian’s six billion tax dollar bonfire is the best example.
In recent days, the Department of Energy has also pledged nearly $300 million for a solar panel and battery program for Sunwealth’s “Project Polo,” a Massachusetts-based marketer of “virtual power plants.”
Last week, the Department of Energy authorized a direct loan of $1.2 billion dollars to Entek’s lithium ion battery plant in Indiana – for, you guessed it, the batteries of electric vehicles.
The Biden regime is rushing through applications at a record pace, in hopes of burning as much federal money as possible on this hill before the incoming Trump administration can bring sanity back to federal spending.
With budget-conscious businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy being chartered to bring common sense to the federal bureaucracy at last through their project nicknamed “the Department of Government Efficiency,” the bureaucrats know that the days of the unchecked government pen are numbered.
As reported last week by Chemical and Engineering News, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has produced an astonishing $37 billion in loans to the industry based on global warming fears known collectively as “green energy companies” since 2021. With this week’s Rivian deal added into it, that’s over $44 billion in government loans to private sector opportunists from just this one cabinet department, in just this one presidential term. And they aren’t done yet; they have every intention of continuing to throw money out the window until President Trump takes the oath at noon, on January 20, 2025.
Are some of these loans worthwhile? Sure, they might be. Out of all these businesses, some are probably based on good business models, with good management and a chance for success in a decent economy. And we will have a decent economy again, once President Trump’s second administration is able to get to work.
But our Constitution never authorized the federal government to do ANY of this. They’re not allowed to favor one technology over another at the expense of American manufacturers and consumers. They’re not allowed to write regulations and threaten and crush businesses that happen to oppose the non-scientific fancies that their kindergarten teachers taught them about the world boiling as a result of a gas that makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere. And they certainly aren’t allowed to make massive loans, sometimes the size of some countries’ GDP, when the country has a massive private banking and investment industry for that very purpose.
The federal bureaucracy’s power to exceed Constitutional authority is crushing our economy, and the ability of elected officials to reward and pay back their friends and donors on the taxpayers’ dime must end.
With the blessing of Divine Providence, President Trump was elected in part to right that very wrong. January 20 can’t come soon enough.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor There are many public policy decisions that are difficult, decisions that require serious thought and perhaps consultation with advisors. And then...
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