update: I should say something about what it explains: it helps explain the recalcitrance of US automakers to build more fuel-efficient cars and their opposition to higher gas taxes and global warming mitigation. Long before energy independence, let alone climate change, became ostensible public policy goals an industrial policy was set upon that incentivized the domestic production and marketing of absurd monstrosities that violated oft-enumerated public interests. Unsurprisingly the beneficiaries found valuable domestic niche markets and defended - nyet, expanded! - their government-protected turf, and eventually that comfortable sucking sound at the public teat turned into a hummer with teeth. Unless our relationships are periodically reevaluated we just end up fucking ourselves.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-05-04 18:38:48 CST |
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