The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) says it will spend nearly $34 million on electric vehicle (EV) charging stations.
Money for the 54 projects in 35 counties – including 11 in Southwestern Pennsylvania – comes from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure funding program.
That’s taxpayer dollars, for those uninitiated in world of slickly monikered government spending programs.
Among the recipients? The Sheetz convenient store chain, British Petroleum and even Tesla. Good grief. Corporate wealthfare knows no bounds.
PennDOT Secretary Mike Carroll touts the money – the first installment of more than $171 million the Keystone State will receive – as “new investments [that] will create good-paying jobs and allow Pennsylvania residents, businesses and visitors to travel across the commonwealth faster, cleaner and more reliably.”
Hold the phone, Mildred!
As we’ve asked before, why in the world are taxpayers having their pockets turned out to heavily subsidize charging stations for already massively taxpayer-subsidized EVs?
To cover this interventionist lie: EVs are cost- and operationally prohibitive without government wealthfare, that’s why.
And at what opportunity cost? That is, this government conscription of scarce public dollars is another in a long line of attempts to command the economy, taking away from the privately chosen and always more efficient free marketplace.
Were taxpayers at the turn into the 20th-century molested to pay for gasoline fueling stations when internal combustion motor vehicles came on the scene?
Of course, not.
Oil companies betting that they could risk their capital to turn a buck paid for “filling stations.” And they have, even with massive ancillary investment in oil exploration and procurement, profited handsomely for more than a century.
The natural progression of market capitalism would have it that electric power companies — identifying the same kind of profit-motive as the oil companies of the last century – would invest their own money in such charging stations.
But, again, the only real demand for EVs has been that which has been “juiced” by the government – “incentives” that are bribes by any other name to EV manufacturers and consumers.
The government, in a putrid exercise in deleterious “industrial policy,” is well on its way to destroying the automotive industry — as it is the electric-power generating industry – with still-unreliable “green” alternatives that will remain not ready for prime time for a very long time.
Lest we be accused of being Luddites, indeed we stand for innovation and progress. But both must be market-driven, not government-commanded in the name of manufactured “social re-engineering.”
The marketplace is not perfect. But government so full of hubris that it believes it knows better, and can do better, is a recipe for certain economic disaster.
And given the wealth of historical information that documents just that, we are sickened at being left to wonder if such a disaster is what the government seeks to further subjugate We the People into We the Sheeple.
There’s simply no excuse for this kind of continued and growing government behavior. It will not end well. For it cannot. Traducing market freedom never does.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
