Thank you for a perfect example, there was no public outcry about misdirected resources because that which is out of sight is out of mind. Certainly, there was no connection that could be made in the public mind about the cost of charging stations and their tax bill. So the way is open for environmental dreamers or clever business lobbyists to inveigle the mayor and the council to install charging stations, even to install them in the wrong place.
Presumably, if there had been a felt market need for charging stations the market would have dictated the most lucrative place to put them. But the invisible hand of the market never came into play. The need was not felt by the public, the cost was not made clear to the public, the public never really participated.
Let's extend the example to electric cars or biofuels, why is it that there is no generalized public outcry against funding these schemes with our own money? Because there is no nexus in the public mind between federal government expenditures and our money. What? Of course there is, you say. Let me refer to a reply written a couple of months ago:
-------------------------------------------------------------
Even today in this world of near infinite ability to print money (at least for a finite period of time) we concern ourselves, but only superficially, about the danger of "moral hazard," the risk that saving the profligate and the unwise by government intervention from the financial consequences of their folly only encourages profligacy, grievous waste of resources and irrational risk. We indulge in moral hazard simply because it is politically rewarding to do so. We provide federal insurance to those who build summer homes at the seashore at great risk of flooding, thus encouraging the building of those homes because the risk has been passed to the taxpayer.
We see crony capitalism at all levels from the awarding of taxicab medallions to the building of electric cars and, infamously, the subsidizing of unsound solar panel companies who coincidently donate heavily to Democrats. The last great credit crash of 2008 was generated in large part by the belief that there was no risk inherent in unsound mortgages because the government was there in the event of default. If German banks are at risk of bankruptcy because of Greek debt default, save the banks and pass the risk to the taxpayers. If the entire world financial system is about to crash in 24 hours, as the world's most eminent financial gurus told a flabbergasted President George Bush one afternoon in 2008, intervene! Print money!
I contend that we actually live not in the world of abundance but in a world of scarcity. Our resources are too scarce to admit as Kamala Harris does in one breath that we should have the equivalent of open borders and no enforcement by ICE and in the next breath demand that health care be free for all illegal immigrants. As Milton Friedman said, a nation cannot have open borders in a welfare state. But our current situation deceives us and incites politicians like Harris to indulge in fantasies. She can do this because, as the reserve currency of the world and as the still surviving economic superpower, we simply print money when we want more socialism. There is no reckoning because we do not run out of other peoples’ money. Our indifference to the fate of the yet unborn borders on the callous cynicism of Planned Parenthood. Yet when one is undeceived by the bubble, one comes to realize that we cannot live at our current standard without borrowing $1 trillion a year. We have no political will to live at a less opulent standard because we have no sense of scarcity.
We do not expect Marxist progressives to have an undeceived comprehension of the real world because their whole life turns on seeing the world in a way that simply baffles us. The progressive Weltanschauung is oxymoronic, progressives believe that the amount of wealth is static and fairness demands that what there it must be redistributed by government. At the same time, they myopically deny that their regulations, their taxes and their moral hazards all combine to freeze that pool of wealth and prevent it from growing as it so obviously failed to do under Obama. All the while they simply assume that the money will be there for the most fantastic and lavish welfare schemes such as those advanced by Camilla Harris on behalf of illegal aliens. Anastasia Occasional-Cortex is so flagrant and so ignorant that her wet dreams along these lines simply mark her as puerile. But these leftist politicians uniformly get away with this nonsense because we live in an illusory world of abundance, of funny money where everyone demands the music play on but no adult is rewarded for acting his age.
No, we cannot have universal free health care at any reasonable standard while we have open borders, thirteen super carriers, a new Space Force, while we also educate and medicate untold millions of illegal intruders, squander money at our educational institutions and subsidize crony capitalist enterprises, unless we are able to continue borrowing $1 trillion a year. This music will not play forever.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Until we come to understand the folly of living in this funny-money bubble, we will have no political will to address the problem of misplaced charging stations, much less E-cars.
