Over the last few years, the world’s transition from powering our cars with gas-burning internal combustion engines to zipping along on battery power has accelerated faster than the Tesla Model S Plaid, which can supposedly got from zero to sixty miles per hour in less than two seconds.

Setting aside my visceral love for the old muscle cars I grew up around, I wholeheartedly support that transition. My own “car” happens to be an electric bicycle (it used to be a regular bicycle, but knee problems made motorization attractive), and I hope that the next family vehicle, or the one after that, will be electric too.

That said, the urge to get society completely electrified and off of fossil fuels suffers from both propaganda oversell and from practical problems.

The big selling point for electrification has always been “emissions reduction.” Whether you accept mainstream climate theory or not, pouring less smog out of tailpipes and into the atmosphere seems like a good idea.

But electrifying cars does not, as such, solve that problem. It matters where the electricity comes from. Running a coal-fired power plant to charge your electric car doesn’t reduce overall pollution. It just moves that pollution off of city streets (which is nice) and into the air around the power plant (which doesn’t change the overall equation).

Lately, spiking gas prices due to US/EU sanctions over Russia’s war on Ukraine have come into vogue as reason to electrify. But again: Unless that electricity is produced using wind, solar, or nuclear, it still entails use of fossil fuels and the attendant pollution.

If electric makes sense for your situation, go electric. But don’t lie to yourself about how much good you’re doing the environment by transitioning. It’s a holistic problem and electric cars are, at best, only part of the solution.

In addition, technology and infrastructure lag still make electrification a problem for those who need to travel long distances in a timely manner.

Rachel Wolfe recently chronicled an all-electric round trip between New Orleans and Chicago for the Wall Street Journal. The headline sums it up nicely: “I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping.”

Even assuming sufficient charging stations along your route (an infrastructure problem), charging your car still burns a lot of time (a technology problem). Even “fast charge” facilities take much longer than a gas fill-up.

Will these problems be solved? Almost certainly. The market for electric cars continues to grow, so the market for more and faster charging options will too.  We’ll get there. But we’re not there yet.

Unfortunately, the urge to “nudge” us in that direction with government subsidies and spending programs will almost certainly take us down various paths that produce worse rather than better outcomes.

Instead of subsidizing electric cars, governments should stop subsidizing fossil fuels. Free markets will always solve these kinds of problems faster, better, and with fewer unintended consequences than government propaganda and force.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The clamor for “gun control” never goes away in American politics. It occasionally simmers down to a dull roar, but every mass shooting recharges the bullhorn batteries.

Thus, in the wake of the recent atrocities in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas,  a Morning Consult / Politico Poll poll says that 56% of Americans consider it “a top priority” or “an important, but lower priority” for Congress to pass legislation “placing additional restrictions on gun ownership,” with only 23% saying that “shouldn’t be done.”

To put it a different way, 56% of Americans resemble the proverbial drunk looking for his car keys under a streetlight, rather than a block away where he lost them, because “the light is better here.”

Let’s set aside the stock arguments over whether the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental human right (it is), whether that right is guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the US Constitution (it is), etc., and focus on the question of whether, if passed, such legislation would solve the problem of mass shootings.

The answer: It wouldn’t.

First of all, mass shooters are criminals. They don’t care about your laws. They operate outside those laws.  Including, as you may have noticed, the “Gun Free School Zones Act,” sponsored by then-US-Senator Joe Biden back in the 1990s. If they want guns, they’ll get guns. If they decide to try to use those guns to kill innocents, they won’t consult the statutes before acting.

Secondly, such legislation could not be meaningfully implemented without a bloodbath the likes of which the US hasn’t seen since 1865.

While estimates vary, at the conservative end (pun not intended) more than 100 million Americans own more than 400 million guns.

For many if not most of those guns and gun owners, the response to “gun control” legislation will always be “no.”

You can’t have them.

If you’re not stupid, you won’t try to take them.

If you do try to take them, go long on the stocks of companies that provide burial, cremation, and funeral services first, because they’re going to make bank. If even 1% of those gun owners resist your edict, it’s going to get very, very ugly.

You don’t have to like it. That’s how it is whether you like it or not.

Even if you don’t agree that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right.

Even if you don’t agree that the Second Amendment means what it says.

Even if you want it really, really, really badly.

What’s the solution to mass murder? I don’t know. I wish I did.

But I do know to look for my car keys where I lost them, instead of wherever the light happens to seem better.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

The Simpsons have gotten real.

The show’s title family closed its thirty-third season on May 22 with a lengthy sequence acknowledging what has long been pointed out: that the setup in which “Homer lives a comfortable life with his wife and three children and has a secure job at the [Springfield nuclear power] plant, despite his nonchalance, laziness and incompetence,” as James C. Wilson noted in 2015, strains plausibility even in a cartoon.

In the not-roaring economy of the 2020s, Bart Simpson would face even longer odds making a living as a performer than his creator beat making him one of the media icons of the 1990s. Lisa Simpson’s book smarts might get her through college, but not out of paying the ensuing debt.

The Simpson kids face that uncertain future while having access to consumer technology unimaginable at the time of their debut. Indeed, the plot of the season finale itself ensues from Marge Simpson streaming a British series at her leisure on the family’s living room TV, which has been upgraded from the clunky cathode ray tube box like the ones that picked up The Simpsons on the fifth of five channels in many real-life Springfields to a slick flatscreen offering a world of choices in crystal clear high definition.

The shift is explained to be the result of “rampant corporate greed, Wall Street malfeasance and the rise of shortsighted politics” by the Clinton administration’s Robert Reich. This is at odds with the show’s takes on wealthy business owners over the decades, which if anything have softened as Mr. Burns’s unrepentant miser has shared the screen with more charitable successors. Bill Gates went from smashing Homer’s startup in season 9’s “Das Bus” to being in the admittedly small Beloved Billionaires Club in season 32’s “Burger Kings.”

Reich declared in a May 21 Facebook post that “monopolies are only good for the monopolists.” It might have been awkward to note how the firms that dominated the middle of the 20th century could pursue long-term projects like Bell Labs, and offer long-term employment, via the same insulation from competition that made them big. Likewise, to reverse “the decline of unions” Reich should take heed of the advice of labor historians Jonathan Cutler and Thaddeus Russell that “when unions compete, workers win.”

The board game Monopoly originated from the insight of Henry George that monopolization of land rent could explain the paradoxical “increase of want with increase of wealth.” This analysis was extended to areas where monopoly was taken for granted by Bertrand Russell, who observed that “in labor disputes, the employer is the immediate enemy, but … the real enemy is the monopolist,” and Benjamin Tucker, who proposed alternatives to the “money monopoly” over a century before cryptocurrency.  Without Mr. Monopoly’s help, a business as small as Homer Simpson’s “Mr. Plow” snow-shoveling service can cut the economic power of Mr. Burns down to size.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Mr. Burns Needs Mr. Monopoly” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, June 3, 2022
2. “Mr. Burns Needs Mr. Monopoly” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon [Indiana] Reporter, June 3, 2022