Daily Archives: 11 December 2024

Prop Up That Industry

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants more government pressure on support for battery cars, their manufacture, and their sale to an uninterested public.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for the introduction of Europe-wide measures to increase uptake of electric vehicles, in a speech at Ford Motor Corp’s factory in Cologne, just weeks after the US car maker outlined plans to lay off 4,000 of its European workers.
In the speech at Ford’s EV factory on Tuesday, Scholz argued Germany should work to facilitate the “leap forward” towards “electromobility” by providing “support” for the country’s car industry, including by subsidizing energy costs for EV battery makers.

And this bit of contradiction:

Scholz said the support for the car industry should also aim to protect worker’s jobs….

He can’t have it both ways, except through government-mandated featherbedding. It takes fewer workers to build an electric motor and a battery car than it does an ICE motor and an ICE-powered car. It takes fewer suppliers to supply fewer parts, and fewer employees at each supplier, to provide the simpler components of a battery car than the more complex components of an ICE car.

The ripples go on from there: secondarily, all those mom-and-pop stores—diners, grocery stores, bars, entertainment venues, and so on—will get fewer customers from those smaller work forces at the EV factories and supplier plants, resulting in fewer mom-and-pops and fewer employees in surviving mom-and-pops.

No. If the battery car industry still needs overt government fiscal subsidies and mandates aimed at pressuring consumers to spend their own money on even subsidized battery cars, those vehicles and that industry aren’t ready for operation.

The only legitimate support for battery cars is the consumers’ interest in buying them in a free, competitive market shorn of government pressures. That interest isn’t yet there.

Rifles and the 2nd Amendment

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday editorial, AR-15 Rifles and the Constitution, is centered on the potential for the Supreme Court to take up the question of whether AR-15s, and semi-automatic rifles in general, are protected by the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution. My commentary here is centered on Judge Harvie Wilkinson III, who wrote the 4th Circuit’s en banc opinion upholding a Maryland law that bans the sale and possession of “assault weapons.” He wrote that such rifles

fall outside the ambit of protection offered by the Second Amendment because, in essence, they are military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations that are ill-suited and disproportionate to the need for self-defense.

He’s both factually wrong on this, and he, like activist judges before and alongside him, distort the 2nd Amendment’s protections to reinterpret that Amendment to say what he wants it to say rather than what it actually says. Here’s the actual text of the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Wilkinson’s factual error: AR-15s and the like are not at all military-style weapons designed for sustained combat operations. They were developed around the same time as the Army’s then-new M-16, but the latter was designed for full automatic use, whereas the AR-15s of the industry were designed explicitly for civilian use in civilian environments and are wholly incapable of (full) automatic operation. They require a brand new, subsequent, trigger pull in order to fire a second round—it’s a new trigger pull for each individual round that’s fired. The only automation in the sequence is the same as with any other semi-automatic firearm (pistols, for instance): it automatically chambers the next round.

Now for Wilkinson’s cynical redefinition reinterpretation of what the Amendment says. The amendment says in so many words—and in only those words—the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. There is not a syllable in that bar, not the veriest minim of a pen stroke, that gives the government any authority at all to say what our needs are in our keeping and bearing Arms. Wilkinson’s writing is nothing more than a power grab for government and an attempt to amend our Constitution from the bench by an activist judge.

But Wilkinson wasn’t done.

Compared to a handgun, the AR-15 is heavier, longer, harder to maneuver in tight quarters, less readily accessible in an emergency, and more difficult to operate with one hand[.]

This is wholly irrelevant and only cynically offered in his effort to rewrite our 2nd Amendment from his august bench. To repeat: Wilkinson, nor any other judge, has any authority to tell us what our needs are and to presume to limit us to those judge-manufactured needs.

On the other hand, Wilkinson’s entire argument in that last is an argument for legal keeping and bearing Uzis and machine pistols: those weapons are most assuredly lighter, shorter, easer to maneuver in tight quarters, more readily accessible in an emergency, and easier to operate with one hand than those judge-hated rifles.

This is an appellate decision that badly needs reversal by the Supreme Court and a stern admonition by that Court for judges who persist in entertaining such quibbles and outright distortions of our Constitution.