“They spit in our faces and call it rain” is an expression that many people use in slightly different – sometimes more offensive -- terms, but the gist is the same: hubristic egomaniacs engage in attacks on you, and they tell you they’re helping you -- that it’s for your own good.
And after the Biden Administration EPA last year issued its edict that by 2026, all domestic vehicle sellers will have to see their lines average 33 percent more than 2021 gas mileage levels, pushing the MPG to 49, it became clearer that Biden and his ilk eagerly were engaging in that kind of maliciousness. The EPA’s longer-term goal would see CAFÉ standards and emissions mandates so strict that by 2032, two-thirds of all cars would be electric (meaning the dreaded “carbon emissions” would come from things like coal plants and unreliable wind farms, the latter of which many politicians seem eager to insulate from criticism over their environmental dangers). And then, in 2035, the final goal is to eliminate nearly all internal combustion engines, per Biden “Executive Order.”
All of it done, not by the political class leaving government to offer you their magical “electric” options in the market. Not by seeing them peacefully compete to produce and see if they can do better than internal combustion car makers. No. This is being done via fiat. By edict. By command.
And for your own good, they say – as you feel the “rain.”
This not only is a typically insidious, injurious line of political aggression against consumers, it’s an overt attack on auto makers and the auto-worker’s unions with whom Biden and his leftist cronies typically try to curry favor.
So one wonders what the members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) will, on the whole, do when strongarm Joe jawbones at them Tuesday in crumbling Detroit. He already has ordered a hefty $12 BILLION bucks to be showered on the auto plants his diktats will force to shift into EV manufacturing, heedless of the fact that his mandates are just the kind of central planning Stalin tried with Ukrainian Kulaks and their farms, that Mao tried more than once, resulting in mass starvation, that the Japanese tried with microchip manufacturing in the 1980s, causing massive devastation to the economy.
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Christian Datoc reports for The Washington Examiner that Biden isn’t just going to speak to the UAW - he’s going to prance and pose.
He’s going to join their picket line, to support the UAW strike against the already dying auto-makers whom Biden wants to hurt even more, even as he puts his $12 billion Band-Aid on the cancer.
"’Tuesday, I'll go to Michigan to join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create,’ Biden tweeted Friday evening. ‘It's time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs.’"
Ahh, yes. The “Fair Share” rhetoric.
Biden and his leftist pals love to use it as they tell YOU what your “fair share” of taxation is, what they’ll take from you, as they define right and wrong and fair and unfair FOR YOU, whether you accept it or not.
Now, he’s cozying up to the very auto-workers whom he and his EPA will put out of business. As auto expert Eric Peters explains, the Bidenista push for EVS will see an artificial change in their manufacturing that will simply kill jobs that normally would be supported in the regular, consumer-driven, productive economy.
Peters already has reported on the lack of consumer interest in electric vehicles, and now, on the strike and the UAW future, he writes:
“The Big Three automakers are losing billions in pursuit of that chimera – on ‘electrification’ – but the old grifter behind the TelePrompter says they ought to “share” their ‘record profits’ with the workers. The etymology of coercion is fascinating. When a government official says ‘share’ he means hand over.”
And this perversion of language also can be seen in the perverse manner by which politicians like Biden try to tell you that their commands and prohibitions and redirections of useable capital are “for your good” and will “save you money,” rather than allowing you and your market choices to decide.
Peters notes:
“Ford CEO Jim Farley recently corrected his previous estimate of the losses incurred by ‘electrification’ from $3 billion to $4.5 billion.”
And, when it comes to the manufacture of these less popular, government-pushed, central-planned rigs? Peters notes:
“(T)he prospect of being out-of-work increases as ‘electrification’ waxes because there isn’t going to be much work left to do. An electric vehicle is simpler to assemble than a vehicle with an engine and transmission and related peripherals. It is basically an extruded plastic shell draped over a ‘skate’ that holds the battery and motor.
Fewer workers are needed to put the two together.”
So, a few UAW strikers might ask Biden why he adopts the pretense of “backing” them in their “struggle” for “fair share” of profits when his own edicts are stripping the auto-makers of profits and pushing them towards insolvency. A few UAW strikers might want to ask him why he sprinkles our tax cash in a $12 billion handout from one hand while punching them with the other hand.
The situation is perverse, and it reminds those who believe in liberty that one cannot fall into the trap of seeing the union members as innocent victims.
As Karen DeCoster, CPA, observed for the Mises Institute in 2007, Americans have been force-fed a multi-decades-long diet of nonsense when it comes to the purported “beneficence” of politically favored trade unions.
“One of my favorite lines from people is the one that goes, ‘Well, nowadays unions are awful, but the early intentions were good.’ The early intentions of unions were the same as the modern goals: to be a social-democratic ideological and political force by aligning class interests with the political elites who hold the power, and using that alliance to minimize the role of the free market and its impact on the lives of individuals by replacing market forces with an interventionist-social engineering order that would be directed by elites from government, labor, and the corporatocracy.”
And, in 2009, economist and Mises Institute Adjunct Scholar Morgan O. Reynolds provided a detailed analysis of how collectivist political forces going back to the late Nineteenth Century have been levered to hand labor unions power over employers and non-labor employees.
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Just two weeks ago, when writing about the head of a Chicago teacher's union, I got to note for MRCTV that:
“(U)nions in America have been given far too much slack and admiration. It’s one thing for workers to form unions in nations where the government controls economic choice and the freedom to start businesses that aren’t at the mercy of that government. Thus, when the Gdansk shipyard union ‘Solidarnosc’ engaged in a work-stoppage to protest the Soviet-Polish government, it was very appropriate for freedom-backers to applaud.
But in the US, in a state where the taxpayer is forced to fund a communist teaching system, the union is tied to and benefits from the state. The union is not fighting against the government. In The US, teachers could enter the private market if they want to. There is no USSR stopping them from doing their work in a free, competitive sphere.”
But we can expect the double-talk to dominate when Biden burns that eeevil carbon to get to Detroit.
And we can expect the climate insanity to get more intense, as Biden just signed an anti-constitutional “Executive Order” to create a youth-based “Climate Corps” that will get our tax cash to engage in “climate activism.”
Joy of joys!
Perhaps now we can convince more folks that the collectivists on all fronts aren’t helpful, that, indeed, they engage in the political equivalent of spitting in our faces and calling it rain.
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