> So you're better off if everyone has one including you... That is transparent bullshit [0]. The west hasn't been competitive at producing cars in 40 years an

> So you're better off if everyone has one including you... That is transparent bullshit [0]. The west hasn't been competitive at producing cars in 40 years and all the benefits of the industrial know-how flowed to Asia where they've built several civilisations worth of capital. I'd be much better off if we'd adopted pro-industrial instead of pro-environmental policies and captured the growth ourselves. The Asians have consistently been building wheeled scrap boxes, working them up to something that meets western standards later on after the industrial foundations are in place; it is these regulations that are killing us and distracting attention from the process efficiencies that actually make people better off. The tragedy of the commons here is that competent people have to share a regulatory framework with the same naturalists who would have turned back the industrial revolution because they thought coal was too polluting. We're still fighting those fools off centuries later and it was absurd to ever give them the time of day given the destruction they have wrought on our industry. And this isn't even considering that by mass western governments are welfare and warfare. This sort of administrative trivia is the most civilisationally crippling but not really what "the government" is by budget. [0] Although on reflection, I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse than the more traditional opaque bullshit. If I were being less inflammatory I might say "you've forgotten to account for the positive externalities of cheap processes; which are decidedly nonlinear and really quite important at the low end of the cost curve".