The EPA and the IRS… it’s the Same “Business”

Guest Post by Eric Peters

This VW business is a lot like the income tax business. And “business” is exactly the right word. It’s a business (albeit a perverted one) in both instances.

The victim is compelled to fund his own persecution.

Yes, VW “cheated.” It is like me using a radar detector to “cheat” a cop out of his quota.

In both cases, the underlying law is ridiculous; the “cheating” nothing more than an attempt to evade the ridiculous. No one is harmed by “speeding” unless the car strikes another car or another person, which happens only rarely. Think about it. Almost all of us “speed” virtually every time we drive and yet accidents happen maybe a couple of times in a lifetime if they ever happen at all

And when it does happen, the cause is more likely to be inattention or some other thing. Not velocity.

In the VW case, no one has been harmed. Not a single flesh-and-blood victim has been produced.

A guy by the name of Daniel Becker with a pompously named outfit called Clean Climate Change says “more pollution means more illness, more premature death.”

Ok, show me one.

Just one.

It shouldn’t be difficult.

The “affected” diesels go back to  the 2009 model year, which is almost eight model years ago (the 2009s having been sold in 2008). Surely, if Becker and all the other sky-is-falling-mongers are right, they ought to be able to produce someone who’s been demonstrably afflicted by the “affected” VWs’ fractionally greater output of “harmful” emissions?

Maybe a bad cough that can be attributed to the fractionally higher emissions Becker, et al, are wailing about?

Nope.

Instead we get: “…regulators estimated the cars could emit as much as 40 times the permitted amounts” of the proscribed compounds (chiefly oxides of nitrogen, acronymned “NOx”).

Well, okay. I estimate that I could run a six minute mile. I estimate that you could be a thief.

It ought to be necessary to prove actual rather than estimated damages before being able to collect actual compensation… don’t you think?

It’s not unlike the IRS claiming we “owe” a sum of money for “services” we never asked for and don’t want, but which we’ll nonetheless be made to pay for anyhow.

Thus VW will be forced to fund “pollution reduction projects” – to the tune of $2.7 billion. And “clean energy development”  – to the tune of $2 billion.

What is “clean energy development”? It is anything not powered by an internal combustion engine – a Tesla electric car, for instance.

Put precisely, VW will be forced to subsidize Tesla and other “clean” rivals.

Which aren’t really.

Electric cars are not powered by Zero Point energy emanating out of the quantum vortex. They are powered by electricity which is produced by utilities that burn coal and oil to generate it. If VW’s allegedly toxic diesels are such a dire threat to human health, how about the emissions produced by these utilities?

They are of course subject to regulation as well – but it’s less draconian than the company-killing fatwas hurled at VW. Which makes one wonder whether the real object of this exercise isn’t emissions but rather the cars themselves.

Specifically, VW’s affordable, efficient diesel-powered cars.

Note the fact that VW was the only car company selling such cars in the United States – and doing so (pre-scandal) very successfully.

Cars like the diesel-powered VW Jetta and Golf and Beetle cost thousands less to buy than a hybrid like the Toyota Prius (and tens of thousands less than an electric car like the Tesla) and so made economic and practical sense.

This, perhaps, presented a problem… for Uncle. Whose animosity toward affordable, practical cars for the average person is as obvious as Hillary’s Leona Helmsley-esque contempt for the laws that apply to the “little people.”

But not to her.

And perhaps VWs diesels amounted to  a “pebble in the shoe” for other car companies who had invested heavily in the economic sinkhole of electric and hybrid car technology – and weren’t at all happy about the success of VW’s economically and functionally viable diesel technology.

It wasn’t necessary to bribe people to buy VW’s diesels with subsidies. And VW didn’t need to internally subsidize its diesel-powered cars by selling them at a loss and making up for the loss through the money earned by selling other (gas-engined) cars – as is rumored to be true about Toyota and its Prius hybrid and is without doubt true about electric cars like the Chevy Volt.

Note also that the total volume of emissions produced by, say, a full-size pick-up truck with a big V8 engine is greater than the output of even a “cheating” VW with an engine one-third the size that burns one-fourth the fuel to travel the same distance.

Hmmm.

It makes you wonder.