The War on Carbon Is a War on Cars. And You.

Has Gavin Newsom Been Driving Your Car? It seems so. In a way.

In 2024, cars on average cost $47,000 each, and almost no one is buying them. Most people are choosing to stick with their old cars, and not only because of the big sticker price shocks. Why then?

Maybe the cars would be worth the extra money if the new features made the car worth more. But it turns out the opposite is true. Many of those new government-mandated “features” actually make the cars worth less…

 • Your car will not stay running, but will decide to turn itself off. Stop-start cycling systems spontaneously shut off the engine when the car is not moving, to reduce fuel consumption, and these are essentially mandatory on new cars.

 • Simple, reachable controls are replaced by difficult to use smartphone-like touch screen menus. (Meanwhile, manual transmissions and CD players are not available at all.)

 • Continuously variable transmissions (CVTs) and diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) are expensive new requirements.

 • Increasingly complex electronics and engines (e.g. twin-turbo V6s) seem more prone to failure.

And your car may secretly spy on you, to see if you’re misbehaving. How many of the electronic devices in your new car are secretly listening to you or otherwise spying on your behavior and reporting it to your insurance company or the government? You don’t know, because they aren’t going to tell you. Because then it wouldn’t be a secret.

It’s going to get worse. By 2032, gasoline powered cars will have to have expensive hybrid and plug-in hybrid systems for automakers to avoid government penalties. Eventually of course, internal combustion cars — i.e. good cars — will be entirely replaced by battery cars, even though most people don’t want them. But that is what the government regulators want.

In general, the new “features” were required to meet the flood of new federal government standards, mandates, and regulations. Those requirements were not created to make cars better, but to make them more woke. Mostly to make them use less gas and to lower emissions, to fight climate change. So most, probably almost all, of the increased cost of cars is due to U.S. government overregulation.

You May Not Be Woke, But Your Car Will Have to Be

You want a new car? It’s going to cost you. Overregulation is going to cost you.

You want a good car? Sorry, they’re illegal now.

The Commiefornia Effect

Some of the increased cost of cars is not due to federal overregulation. Some of it is due to an underhanded kind of state government regulation. Mostly caused by — you guessed it — the Socialist Republic of California.

That kind of government regulation is called the Sacramento Effect (or California Effect). The state government of Commiefornia can create new regulations for cars, and the car companies have no choice but to comply because California is such a big market. This gives the far-left state government of California the power to regulate the cars driven by the people in the other 49 states.

And it isn't just your car. California’s climate dictators have created the California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) order, that would ban locomotives that are 23 years old or older from running in the state, requiring them all to be replaced by zero-emission locomotives by 2029. These engines require batteries six to ten times larger than those now commercially available and will cost a lot more. Nor is it just transportation; it’s also technology. In 2024, the California Senate is considering a bill that would give the CA state government control of AI software nationwide. The “Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act.”

What’s Been Happening to Your Auto Insurance Premium?

The increasing cost of cars, due to overregulation, is also part of the cause of skyrocketing auto insurance costs. Leftists like Elizabeth Warren blame the 2024 immense rise in insurance costs on global warming, who said, “...now when climate risks are rising, they’re trying to hang American families out to dry here and demanding higher premiums…” Leftists say the solution to high insurance costs is — you guessed it — more government regulation of the car and insurance businesses.

But the simple truth is that it costs insurance companies more to replace or repair cars because government regulators have increased new vehicle prices by 29.5%, and used vehicle prices by 20.4%, since January 2020. And the cost of car parts is up 21.7% and repair costs are up 48%. Of course insurance companies have to charge more, or else go out of business.

Conclusion: Why This is Important!

It’s important because government overregulation is important, a lot more important than we realize. Most of us are bored by the subject of government regulation. Your eyes probably start to glaze over when you read numbers like:

In 2019, researchers found that there were, "...estimated 5,199 crimes then in the U.S. Criminal Code...  [and] another 300,000 or so regulations may be enforceable by way of criminal punishment at the discretion of an administrative agency. That’s only federal law. Each state has its own penal code... Many of these crimes apply to conduct no rational person would expect to be a crime."

Richard Dooling, "In America, Anyone Can Be a Felon" Wall Street Journal (2024)

...the estimated annual cost of federal regulations in 2008 exceeded $1.75 trillion. The Office of Management and Budget says that the federal government has issued more than 132,000 final rules since 1981, and over 1,200 of those rules have an estimated economic impact of greater than $100 million each...

Sen. Mark Warner (Dem) VA “To Revive the Economy, Pull Back the Red Tape” (2010)

The Federal Register records the new laws created by the federal government. According to the Consumer Enterprise Institute, nearly a million pages of new regulations are expected to be added in the 2020s.

Please stop for a moment and think about this statement:

Americans’ daily lives are governed by both laws and regulations, the former enacted by Congress and the latter issued by the numerous regulatory agencies in the federal government’s executive branch. These agencies are collectively known as the administration state, the deep state, or pejoratively, “the swamp.”

Few Americans realize the extent of federal regulations and the costs they impose on everyone. The United States Constitution makes no mention of regulatory agencies, nor did the Founders ever anticipate the growth of what might be considered the fourth branch of the federal government.

Regulatory growth, moreover, has flourished with major bursts of government statutory expansion during the 1930s’ New Deal, 1960s’ Great Society, mid-2000s’ financial crisis, and the early 2020s’ virus panic. Undeterred, the Joe Biden administration continues its regulatory onslaught, destined now to far overshadow that of previous administrations.

Jane L. Johnson, "The Biden Administration Uses Fudged Numbers to Justify Imposing Punitive Regulations" (2024)

But if government regulation is really so big and bad, why don't you care about it? Because if you do care about it, you are one of a tiny minority of Americans. It’s true what Jane L. Johnson wrote, "Few Americans realize the extent of federal regulations and the costs they impose on everyone." In fact, it’s very, very few.

But the overregulation of America by the U.S. government should be a bigger issue than transgenderism, foreign aid, or even illegal immigration, because overregulation costs us more than any of those things. Far more than them. Put together. The amount of damage that overregulation is causing us, in numerous ways, is probably incalculable. But who cares?

Overregulation is a plague on Americans created by the U.S. government, and the damage it does exceeds that of the Covid plague on Americans created by the U.S. government. Overregulation does more damage than illegal immigration. More damage than inflation. It is a big cause of inflation.

Most people don’t seem to care about it at all. Why isn’t overregulation a bigger issue?

2 Reasons

1. The leftist media doesn’t want to make an issue of the vast amount of regulation that the government creates. Instead, the mass media wants to hide it. And not only hide it, but the media created the “Era of Deregulation” untruth to blame problems that are really caused by too much government regulation on ‘too much freedom’. And too much freedom was caused, the media says, by an “Era of Deregulation”, that never really happened. As we prove in the book OVERREGULATED: The crazy history of the phony “Era of Deregulation” meme, and the true story of the Overregulation of America... Read it free online or buy a paper copy.

2. Most Americans are not concerned by the creation of hundreds of thousands of new crimes because most Americans are not charged with those crimes, even though they could be. The federal government regulators don’t create all those crimes so that they can put everyone in prison — they want us outside prison working at our jobs to pay taxes. The government creates all those crimes so that they can put anyone in prison.

Lawfare and selective prosecution give prosecutors and other government officials big power to control the rest of us.

Where Does All This Fit In?

The overregulation of America, including carbon and cars, is only one part of a much larger story. Anti-Leftism is just the beginning of the story. The next chapter tries to edge toward an answer the question, ‘What are we going to do about it?’

What comes after anti-leftism? Pro-rightism. We have a lot to say about that, and we want you to join the discussion.

You can see the entire in-progress outline of Anti-Leftism at RightfulFreedom.com, if you’re interested.