By petrovk @ Adobe Stock
When the government sticks its nose into entire industries, like Germany has done with electric cars, you end up with a gutting of jobs. When, instead, companies are allowed to cater to their customers, they have the benefit of time and experimentation to see what is economically viable. Instead, what’s happening in Germany is the country’s vaunted auto industry could be lost thanks to political meddling in what should be a free market. In The Wall Street Journal, Joseph C. Sternberg explains that Europe’s electric vehicle mandates are to blame. And based on my recent trip to Paris, it’s not just Germans who are frustrated with green energy boondoggles. Your Survival Guy can see the yellow vests and their open frustrations more and more each trip. Sternberg explains that the mandates are killing human capital, and could lead to a collapse of the auto industry in Germany, writing:
Lurking behind all this are two emergencies. One is the calamity for individual households whose breadwinners are pushed out of previously stable trades by a political vanity project by the progressive left.
The other is the economic disaster of “human capital” destroyed. The 190,000 people who will no longer be employed by Germany’s car industry after the green transition, for instance, are 190,000 people who know how to perform highly skilled tasks. They will no longer be practicing those industrial arts or—crucially—passing them on to the next generation of apprentices and younger workers. Once that deep well of knowledge is depleted, it isn’t obvious how it can be replenished.
In other words, Germany will forget how to manufacture internal-combustion autos.
This column has no brief for dying industries, which is why you’ve never read me complain about dwindling employment in candle making or fax-machine manufacturing. The German saga is a graphic illustration of why the forced transition to a zero-carbon economy is different.
Normal economic evolution is driven by new industries pulling consumers and workers away from dying fields and toward new opportunities. The green transition is happening suddenly and on an assumption—made by politicians and activists and practically no one else—that one can push unwilling consumers and labor out of currently thriving industries and into jobs and forms of consumption that don’t exist but can be conjured forth with sufficient political will.
This is unpopular with consumers and destructive of jobs, and yet it could prove irreversible if the process is allowed to grind on for too long. Volkswagen’s saga offers America many warnings. One of the subtler but more important is to stop before it’s too late.
Action Line: Your Survival Guy regularly warns you about politicians who put their own political agendas ahead of the financial and physical security of their constituents. This is one more case that falls into that category. European politicians are so hell-bent on defeating an amorphous definition of “climate change” that they’ve forgotten about their constituents’ ability to make a living. Don’t think for a second that this couldn’t happen in America, it can, and probably already is to a certain extent. Stay informed. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy
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