A reader writes in to respond to Henry Payne’s item last week on Robert Zubrin’s flex-fuel argument:
I don’t understand your hostility to Zubrin’s plan. All he’s saying is to mandate the change to cars (about $100/car) and then let the market take over. Your plan, I suppose, is to let the market takeover without the mandate. Don’t you think his plan might speed up the process considerably?
You’re fond of describing Brazil’s conversion to FFV’s. Are you seriously comparing this backward, corrupt, Third World mess to the U.S.? Do you think our venture capitalists, farmers, and industrialists are on par with Brazil’s? Again, since Zubrin’s plan doesn’t mandate any of the government interference you mentioned (taxes, incentives, government takeover, etc.) that Brazil did, why the comparison?
I’m a fan of National Review, but it pains me to see conservatives attack people with ideas and simply think the market will take over. The market didn’t take over going to the moon, the atom bomb, the original internet — things we wanted or needed quickly and couldn’t wait for the market to create.
This characterization of Brazil has Argentines the world over cheering wildly. But the reader raises two issues that deserve closer scrutiny: 1) that national security cannot always be left to market forces, a point made in this space on Friday; and 2) that an auto fuel-line mandate does not necessarily mean further government interference in the auto fuel market. We’ll have more on these issues later (unless someone beats us to it).