Before you allow “authorities” to cart you off for “reeducation”, thinking, perhaps, that you’re wrong to suspect vast, tax-funded, political forces are targeting you, targeting the voluntary market, and targeting your peaceful choices -- even of home appliances -- take a gander at this: the Biden Administration Friday once more employed that quaint euphemism “standards” as it announced sweeping new threats its members are lobbing at appliance manufacturers, sellers, and consumers.
Thomas Catenacci reports for Fox News:
“The Biden administration proposed sweeping rules Friday to boost energy efficiency standards for clothes washers and refrigerators in an action it claimed would save consumers money and "significantly reduce pollution."
Which widens a few eyes among people who understand how markets work.
They work, of course, by catering to consumers, and those consumers drive folks like appliance makers and sellers to offer increasingly efficient items at lower prices. The CONSUMER must define what is or is not “efficient” based on the give and take of cost, durability, and many other factors that all are subjective and must be expressed through purchase or rejection of various makes and models. Government bureaucrats, on the other hand, mandate uniformity and strangle experimentation, even as they claim they are the arbiters of what, in a moral world, would be reserved for peaceful participants in a market.
Adds Catenacci:
“The Department of Energy (DOE) said the two regulations, which would be implemented in 2027 if approved, are projected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 233 million metric tons over the next 30 years. The agency also estimated that the energy-efficiency standards taking certain appliance models off the market would save $3.5 billion on an annual basis.”
Those who understand markets and peace also might note that fulcrum term: “If approved.”
This isn’t a matter of Congress writing a new statute – and even if Congress were to do that, such a statutory mandate would not be constitutional or moral.
This is a self-referential matter. The Department of Energy “proposes” what its thugs want to propose, then it allows for “a public hearing” during which the DOE will let us serfs and the manufacturers ask for forbearance and to be left alone, and then its staff will do whatever the heck they want.
Hand-wipe. Done.
This is a variation on the proposal we heard two weeks ago, the one about the Consumer Product “Safety” Commission wanting to ban gas stoves for future sale and installation.
Evidently taking a break from laughing about the federal clamps imposed on oil and gas exploration that have contributed to major spikes in home heating, food, and travel costs, “Energy Secretary” (so nice to know that the term doesn’t appear in the Constitution) Jennifer Granholm spouted this in a statement:
"With today’s proposals, we’re building on a decades-long effort with our industry partners to ensure tomorrow’s appliances work more efficiently and save Americans money.”
"Industry partners." "Save Americans money." This sounds perilously akin to Mafia-speak.
Related: Global Leaders Invoke WWII 'Austerity' Rhetoric to Justify Economy-Killing Policies | MRCTV
They’re offers the “industry partners” just can’t refuse. Offers “Americans” can’t choose not to accept should they want to buy fridges and clothes washers.
In other words, they aren’t offers at all. They are commands.
Catenacci adds more dark details, which ought to be remembered and shared:
“According to the announcement, the washers and refrigerators affected by the regulations currently represent 5% of annual residential energy use and 8% of residential electricity use nationwide.”
Whether those represent a small portion or a large portion of the market, it is not the place of politicians to tell others how to run their businesses and homes.
And, in fact, this move is just one of many the Biden thugs have undertaken to smash US appliance buyers.
“The new standards proposed for the two household appliances are the latest in a series of energy efficiency actions the Biden administration has pursued since taking office two years ago. In 2022 alone, the administration took more than 110 actions on appliances.
On his first day in office in January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order requiring the Department of Energy to make ‘major revisions’ to current appliance regulation standards and standards set by the Trump administration. A month later, the agency listed more than a dozen energy efficiency rules, impacting appliances like water heaters, cooking products and lamps, that it would review.”
These are the kinds of invasive, paternalistic, hubristic and evil attacks on peaceful commerce that the American revolutionaries would have raised arms to oppose. Since its establishment in 1977 by the offensive and constitution-defying Carter Administration, the Department of Energy has engaged in never-ending threats, fines, pork schemes, commands, prohibitions, claims to land, and impositions on consumers that not only have cost untold damage to our wallets, the DOE actions have damaged lives.
Its central command-and-control view is Soviet-Style, and it must be opposed.
Consumers can decide what is “efficient” for them, and makers can respond. Are politicians to decide what is “efficient” for our relationships in other areas of life, as well? Too much TV? Too much reading under a lamp? Did you drive to the shore with your spouse or family? Sorry. That’s not “efficient” in the eyes of the Carbon-Crazies in the Climate Cult.
And your life is their sacrificial lamb.
Related: Inconvenient: Global Temps Lower Now Than When Gore Received Nobel Prize | MRCTV