American Buy Hybrids For Power

HERE IN SEATTLE just about every liberal in the city is driving around contentedly in a Toyota Prius saving oodles of gasoline with Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive®. They have the same conceited look on their faces as shoppers at PCC Natural Markets while they watch their groceries being bagged into their own bags that they bring to the market. Not for them the evils of non-recyclable plastic sacks.

But all is not well in the hybrid car business. Most Americans buy hybrids not for the gas mileage or to save the environment. They buy them for the extra power. That is what Matthew L. Wald reports in The New York Times.

Mark Buford just bought a hybrid Honda Accord. It’s the top of the line V6 Accord and it gets about the same gas mileage as the four cylinder Accord costing $10,000 less. Buford “liked the way that the electric motor on his new car kicked in early during acceleration.” He

got just what he wanted from the Accord, a hybrid with no sacrifices. “I wasn’t prepared to give up anything to `go green’ - not performance, amenities, or space,” he said.

But guess what. Mark still gets the tax subsidy for buying hybrid. The national nannies are not amused.

“The new ones are all being used for power,” said Kateri Callahan, the president of the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit advocacy group based here.
Hybrids should be encouraged, Ms. Callahan said, because their electric components some day could be useful in an all-electric car, perhaps running on a fuel cell. But she added that the government should be careful about which hybrids it subsidizes through tax benefits.

Don’t you just love these activists that care so much about us, and only want to force us to conform to their agenda in our own best interest?

A word to nonprofit advocate Kateri Callahan. If you want to be “careful” about something, the last thing you’d do if you had any sense would be to get the government involved. Let’s just call it the “precautionary principle.”

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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