[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ere’s a Sunday headline from the the liberals’ left-wing Postmedia (Vancouver) division this morning: Vancouver council urged to provide more electric-vehicle charging stations.
It’s another example of their daily liberal-left affirmation program. The whole paper — The Province — is like this.
Note that the “urging” for charging stations comes not from the folks, or companies, or anything like that — the “urging” comes from… the city government itself.
Hideous.
Its like me writing a headline and article about the Strong Demand for Massive Tax and Regulation Reductions and Much Smaller Government — and as you read the article you find out it was demanded by me and my conservative pals (strongly). Of course that article would only ever, ever happen here. Never, ever in a mainstream newspaper.
From their article:
Staff estimate that about $3 million is needed over the next five years to “broaden the market” for non-polluting vehicles…
Why is a government interfering in yet another segment of the erstwhile free market? Well, apparently, because another level of government has already fouled the market up, and so now it’s apparently impossible for the city government to deal with the other government and so the city government must get more involved in the (erstwhile) free market — and do it at more taxpayer expense. See this statement in the article:
…“very onerous” restrictions associated with the B.C. Utilities Commission Act make it difficult for private companies to build such stations for profit.
So city government has to spend millions in taxpayer money because the provincial government has restricted private enterprise from doing what it does best at no cost to government or taxpayers (and which it does way better than the state, as this shows).
Question: Is the city government utterly powerless to shake up the entrenched bigger government and their stupidity, even if it’s to save millions of taxpayer dollars and make life better and easier for the folks?
No. The answer to that question is a hard no.
You or I could correct this big-government stupidity in about 20 minutes, for free, and everybody knows it. This ugly and expensive quagmire of government-on-government action — this stupidity — is the result of years of pure left-wing political ideology at work. It’s not pragmatism. It’s not science. It’s not concern for the environment (which private enterprise is more than willing and capable of addressing — thus the need for electric vehicle charging stations in the first place, for example).
Both levels of liberal-left government are ideologically reticent to restrict any government control or any involvement in any facets of our lives. The more they can get their know-it-all fingers into our lives and control them, the better, as they see it. They’re progressives. Liberals. Some are full-out socialists. These are not conservatives doing this.
This is insane.
It reminds me of an earlier liberal, Pierre Trudeau — together with the extreme left NDP — who, in their great wisdom, declared that state-owned gas stations were needed across the nation (and thus Petro Canada became so). That was equally insane — to say nothing of socialist (or am I being redundant?).
Oh, and by the way, as the article points out, these charging stations are really not that necessary anyway. Read this part from the print edition which was removed from the online version of the story:
More than 90 percent of trips taken in Vancouver are less than 30 kilometres, significantly less than the shortest range of electric vehicles on the market.
(Also, I spell it kilometers because I speak in English.)
If left-wing governments want to “broaden the market,” they should get the Hell out of the market. Get out of our way. That’s the only way to broaden the market, and it’s literally more than free.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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