Freedom is Inefficient
As the lower-tier Democratic presidential candidates try to distinguish themselves by out-communisting one another, Andrew Yang’s contribution to the totalitarian sweepstakes is to propose that by 2050, the United States should be a private-automobile-free zone, replacing private cars with “a constant roving fleet of electric [and publicly-owned] cars.”
To combat the evil effects of fossil fuels, of course.
Because no alternative means of fueling private automobiles could possibly become viable in the interim.
Isn’t it peculiar that Yang, like all other climate Armageddon novelists — pardon me, I meant Nobelists! — is insistent on a particularly radical practical means to his end, namely outlawing private vehicles, rather than on the supposed climate goal per se, which is to reduce the use of fossil fuels?
No, it isn’t peculiar at all, of course, as long as you keep your head out of the ozone, and your eyes focused on the reality of the climate fraud, rather than on its rhetoric. For an example of such clear-headed focus, I give you my friend Tim Birdnow, who at his blog notes (“To Kill a Thunderbird; the Agenda 21 Ghetto”) Yang’s wish to eliminate private cars in favor of his electric “roving fleet,” and then heads straight for the point — the real point, not the one Yang and his fellow Marxist totalitarians want you to focus on.
The ruse is to provide public transportation for people. That’s old hat. But the real plan is to keep people from actually going where they will, and not being watched in the process. A fleet of public cars would not take you to, say, my cabin – the glorious Ozark Hilton – back in the woods. It also would keep a record of everywhere you went, meaning the government would keep you under control.
You can’t control what you can’t catch. The Progressives know that, which is why they have waged a war on private ownership of cars for a long time. They have to get us out of them, and into their Agenda 21 ghettos.
And that’s it, folks. All of it. There is no “climate agenda” here. This is a population control agenda. That’s why, as I just recently pointed out here in Limbo for the nth time, you don’t hear any climate change warnings from people who do not simultaneously advocate new, broad, multinational, supra-electoral political powers as the only and necessary solution for the supposed crisis. The new political powers themselves are the only real goal.
Consider the explanation Yang gives for the superiority of his electric fleet proposal:
He told MSNBC host Ali Velshi that “we might not own our own cars” by 2050 to wean the United States economy off of fossil fuels, describing private car ownership as “really inefficient and bad for the environment.”
Private car ownership is “really inefficient.” Is it? Is it inefficient for families who choose to live in a small community outside the city limits but who also like being able to work or attend school in town? Is it inefficient for people who want to enjoy the independence of heading out somewhere off the beaten track, or on their own peculiar schedule, or in the privacy of their own quiet thoughts? Is it inefficient for people who enjoy coastal drives with loved ones, long drives alone in the mountains to clear their minds, spontaneous jaunts out of town for a nice picnic near a river? Is it inefficient for men who want to drive their wives to the hospital when the labor pains have started? For those who wish to take old and infirm relatives to church? For parents with handicapped children whom they wish to deliver to and from school or rehabilitation at their own preferred times?
Needless to say, private automobiles are very efficient indeed for all such cases, and a hundred others.
What Yang means, without mincing words but also without exaggerating, is simple: Private cars are inefficient for a society that is going to be operated according to progressive plans, which is to say as a top-down “benevolent dictatorship,” in which every citizen’s behavior, needs, and even intentions will be managed and regulated by a vast administrative state with the power to set and enforce guidelines and standards for all human activities, all work conditions, all child-rearing, all recreation, and all social attitudes and preferences.
Private automobiles are both symbolic and practically facilitative of a world of private choice, private thought, and private, unregulated and unmonitored action. Such privacy — individual life lived on individual terms — is the antithesis and natural obstacle to the core aims of progressive political evolution. Hence, from the progressive point of view, private automobiles are extremely “inefficient,” to be sure.
