Comment by londons_explore
Comment by londons_explore 4 hours ago
When entire industries are automated, and one CEO can mine and sell millions of tons just by clicking buttons on a computer, it raises the question what incentive governments have to protect that industry.
There is no longer the "voters don't want to lose their jobs" argument. Now it becomes purely a "these guys pay lots of taxes" argument - but with most big companies being very efficient at tax planning, a huge mine might pay next to no taxes too. Then it becomes politically far easier to ignore them, and eventually maybe shut them down on a whim, eg. to appease green voters.
There is no such logic going on in the political calculus. It’s a fallacious call to a past where an uneducated man could get a good job in the mines, and by fallacious implication the entire ecosystem of work for uneducated men, that existed 50 years ago and does not now. It’s a symbol of something lost to “liberal” political ideology - something people who have never worked in a mine but also feel disenfranchised can get behind. There is no real belief coal is coming back into style, no one anywhere wants a coal plant operating near them and even if we built more, no one else on earth would buy our excess coal. It’s a canard and a red herring to distract disenfranchised under employed under educated and under skilled Americans, just like the anti-immigrant agenda, and all the other fallacies the modern conservative movement is built around. The goal isn’t to solve a single actual structural problem - it’s to appeal emotionally with things that sound like they could solve problems, despite the fact they wouldn’t if implemented and would make many other things worse.
There was once a time the conservative movement was built on pragmatic rationalism, and people keep looking for it in modern rhetoric. But it’s become built on fallacious populism recently as a short term way to grab power, then overwhelm the system to “rig” it towards their favored people. It’s not about conservatives or liberals, ideology or political goals are the foil. The goal is the appropriation of power and the blocking of democratic change in favor of cronyism.
So there’s no point in trying to find a rational explanation for the policy. There is none in the policy itself. It only exists to garner enough votes to do what’s happening in real time with the goal that with enough shenanigans voting won’t matter next time.