Topic: Economics
A quiet death An article about the destruction of the EV1 and how it reflects our national conciousness.by Aaron Wolfe
(libertarian)
Monday, July 14, 2008
It is with great reluctance that I have chosen a highly controversial woman - one whom I have harbored a love-hate relationship with for a while now - as an illustration for this column. She is none other than Ayn Rand, an infamous and brilliant personality who emerged from the height of the Cold War.
For those unfamiliar with her work, she was a popular novelist and philosopher who gained most of her notoriety (and infamy) in the 1950s. The best known of her books is the epic - an understatement at over 1,000 pages - "Atlas Shrugged," a novel that serves as a giant allegory for her ultra-conservative beliefs.
For those familiar with this book, one of two reactions has already occurred: praise for referencing Ayn Rand or a burning desire to gut me with a Soviet hammer and sickle.
So why risk this frightening of public backlash? It's because some 30 years before the first Congressional hearings on global warming, Mrs. Rand inadvertently predicted our current environmental quagmire. Her fiction has entered our reality.
In 1997, General Motors introduced 650 electric cars called EV1s. They were leased to customers that ranged from middle class Americans to Hollywood royalty, and within two years became so popular there was a waiting list for over 4,000 people.
However, by the end of 2001, only a handful of celebrities, politicians and wealthy clients were allowed to renew their contracts. As for the other EV1 owners, they returned their cars to GM, but only after continuous threats of criminal prosecution.
And what happened to the world's first marketable electric car? It was completely and systematically destroyed.
The tie-in to Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is, if one is familiar with it, very clear. Nine chapters into the novel, a unique engine is discovered in the remnants of a car factory. The motor was not powered by gasoline but by static electricity. It was the cleanest and most effective means of transportation known to man, but it could not be utilized.
Its creator gutted the invention before disappearing and left no clues as to his identity or how to fix the engine. The story's heroine, Dagny Taggart, suspects this person has joined a conspiracy to dismantle the country by depraving it of its greatest thinkers and therefore its vital technology, hence the title's reference to Atlas, the Greek god who holds Earth on his shoulders.
Mrs. Rand's symbolic "Atlases" - industrialists, philosophers and artists - refuse to allow a corrupt government to exploit their talents.
And therein lies the problem. Those responsible for destroying the EV1 didn't do so because it would be misused. In the face of a global climate crisis, corporate CEOs pulled this car - one that would have been incredibly popular - and gave incentive for other companies to follow suit in order to protect oil interests.
This is not how America should work. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, capitalism. And regardless of political affiliation, we can all agree that a rapidly applicable alternative to fossil fuel is necessary for the survival of our planet.
The changes we need so badly will not arrive unless we begin to change this asinine way of doing business, unless, in the words of Ayn Rand, businessmen and politicians realize that wealth should not be the product of maintaining the status quo, but in "one's capacity to think."
And that's something we have, for quite some time now, stopped doing.
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I have comments on a number of your points, but no priase nor desire to gut you...
First on "Libertarian" - sadly the Libertarian party misunderstands the basis for true liberty. It can't be just my enemy's enemy is my friend - where the enemy is government in general. Ayn Rand disowned any association with the Libertarians because they did not understand the importance of basing one's politics on a sound morality.
Politics without an ethical base is like building the 4th floor of a building without those that must hold it up. This is a litteral reference to the three categories of philosophy that underpin politics which is theory of social institutions. The third is theory or human action - ethics. The second is theory of knowledge - epistemology. The first is theory of existance - metaphysics. Rand has grounded these for the first time in recorded history. I think she did for philosophy what Newton did for physics.
Necessarily, challenging the premises of a culture and those in power will cause defensive attacks. Fortunately, accademia is now starting to take her imnnovations seriously. It will take a few more decades for it to become the cultural norm. the good news is that it is consistent with reality - that's her test for being worthy of respect. And we can all test that independently if we learn the skill of recognizing premises and considering alternatives - not something our culture currently teaches.
You say, "Mrs. Rand inadvertently predicted our current environmental quagmire. Her fiction has entered our reality."
I couldn't disagree more. The quagmire is the absence of reason and the preemenience of religious, mystical guilt and control alongside environmental, mystical guilt and control. Both lead to loss of individual rights and growth of government controls. Like half a century ago, the Nazis and the Communists had different arbitrary excuses to enslave the population, we are losing our freedoms day-by-day to two forces that are false alternatives to reason and freedom, just as it was last century.
And then there's your conventional abuse of the concept - 'reality'. We need a word for each important concept. 'Reality' is properly reserved for the referent for all evidence of fact. It's what science provides tools to test to distinguish fact from fiction. And that's what Ayn Rand brings to philosophy - tools for thinking and distinguishing fact from fiction in a domain that previously was pre-science.
And finally your real topic - the EV1. You claim that CEOs are pulling a product that the public wants to protect oil interests. That makes no sense. They are motivated by profit - long term profit. If they think they have a marketable and maintainable product they stand to make tons of profits.
Obviously you are not considering the market as they understand it. Have you ever had to invent, produce and maintain a product company? The complexity of that being taken for granted is what Atlas Shrugged is about. It so easy to take the producers for granted while focusing on consumption. And that's one of Marxism's key errors.
And then there's the government regulation that destroys the evidence of real market forces. If you haven't read it, see Henry Hazlit's 60 year old mini-masterpiece, "Economics in One Lesson". You can even get it free online.
I hope you reason more effectively before you next put finger to keyboard.
For those wishing for more information on the EV1 and its subsequent death, I highly recommend the easily available documentary "Who Killed The Electric Car?", available at Blockbuster or Netflix, etc.
The markets did. There was no life for the EV1 at that time without subsidies. The cost of fuel did not demand that an alternative to the gasoline engine be brought to market.
If the EV1 was a feasible alternative to gasoline powered cars, then hundreds of entrepreneurial companies - domestic and international - would have worked on developing an equivalent product. GM and other leading car companies could not buy out everyone's silence (certainly not all those leftist entrepreneurs who certainly knew about the EV1).
The EV1 story is simply a leftist conspiracy fable designed to fool those gullible enough not to think through the story's underlying premises.
And no, we cannot "all agree that a rapidly applicable alternative to fossil fuel is necessary for the survival of our planet." It is certainly debatable as to whether CO2 is contributing to global warming, and whether this is necessarily a bad thing.
Lastly, we cannot agree that government control of fossil fuel production and consumption is a good thing. Rather, this will likely lead to inflation, shortages of numerous commodities, and an overall lower standard of living.
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