November 12, 2013
Charles Lane used his column today to take potshots at Tesla, the electric car company. While I actually share much of Lane’s skepticism on Tesla (I suspect Tesla is taking lots of people for a ride, but not in their cars) his dismissal of liberals’ interest in Tesla type projects is off the mark. He starts his piece by telling readers:
“Tesla epitomizes the mutation of modern American liberalism. Once an ideology whose central concern was the plight of lunch-bucket working stiffs and oppressed minorities, liberalism is increasingly about environmentalism and related ‘quality of life’ issues.”
Lane’s distinction between issues concerning lunch-bucket working stiffs and oppressed minorities and environmentalism is just silly. When Sandy hit New York and New Jersey last year a lot of people who looked like lunch-bucket working stiffs had their homes and businesses destroyed. This will be largely the story of global warming. The rich mostly have their homes on more protected areas and when their property does get hit they have insurance that protects them financially from the impact. The people who will mostly risk life, injury, and homelessness from rising oceans and extreme weather event will be lunch-bucket working stiffs and oppressed minorities.
Furthermore, spending on measures to counter global warming are essentially costless in an economy that is below full employment, which all projections show will be the case for many years into the future. (I am referring to real world accounting, not to the nutty deficit hysterics we get in Washington.) This means that spending money on measures to slow global warming are a way to give jobs to lunch-bucket working stiffs and oppressed minorities who would otherwise be left unemployed by the economic policies of the Washington crew.
Lane isn’t clear what “quality of life” issues he has in mind, but if these are items like paid family and sick leave, these are also very much issues for the benefit of lunch-bucket working stiffs and oppressed minorities. Lunch-bucket working stiffs and oppressed minorities, especially of the female persuasion, often lose their jobs because they have to care for a sick child or relative and the boss refuses to give them a day off. This is about as bread and butter an issue as you can get. The concern of liberals over such issues reflects a change in the reality of the workplace, not a change in their priorities.
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