Elon Musk's mast plan, part deux

[Clay Shentrup]

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

You have to love the genius of penning it in layman-friendly witty prose. I like this excerpt:

"By definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better."

It seems like this is a case of the free market creating a solution to a global problem that governments are incapable of handling. Why are they incapable of handling it? Probably the voting method.

[Clay Shentrup]

Spoken like a true utilitarian:

I should add a note here to explain why Tesla is deploying partial autonomy now, rather than waiting until some point in the future. The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability.

[Steve Cobb]

How ironic: one of the top justifications for government--right after protection of rights and enforcement of contract--is provision of public goods, because free markets will fail to provide them adequately. But I doubt that the primary cause of any government failure here is the voting method; there are plenty of other things that can go wrong with it, and the majority is not always right:

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." ~H. L. Mencken

Musk's Master Plan is indeed ingenious, and ingenuous. 

[Kevin Baas]

There are broader theories of government. The declaration of independance, based on ideas from John Locke, et al., includes "providing for the general welfare."

This is deliberately vague, but it immediately provokes a comparative perspective: what should be left to the individual, and to what the government? And to the same degree that this short phrase provokes the question, it answer it: that which can better provide, shall.

And when we are talking about ecology and natural resources, that is distinctly the government, informed (hopefully) by science.

[Steve Cobb]

The DOI mentions that governments are created "to secure rights"; the preamble of the US Constitution lists "promote the general welfare" as being among the Constitution's goals. At the time this was understood to mean that promoting the welfare of the general population (rather than specific interests) was a necessary (not sufficient) condition of federal government action.

Yes, redistribution is now often added to the list of government functions. In the US it was considered possibly the role of state governments, but not the role of the federal government, until FDR. Regardless, few would disagree that redistribution is secondary to the primary category of security functions, and that it comes under the category of public goods. Well, national defense is also a public good, in fact the only true public good according to Ronald Coase.

[Frank Martinez]

Not so ironic when You consider the fact Tesla has needed massive government assistance to get where it is. I'm glad it got it; Let's just not ignore it.

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