Last week, a bank in Australia announced that it would no longer lend money for the purchase of gasoline powered cars. From now on, Bank Australia will lend money only to buyers of electric cars. Bank Australia is not one of the big four Australian banks that control 80% of the Australian market, but the publicity from this move is expected to rally the faithful.

There is no public consensus in the West in favor of electric cars. They have limited range. They are expensive. Recharging the battery is extremely time consuming and costly. The batteries often need to be replaced at a cost that equals or exceeds the price of a new car. The cars constitute a fire hazard which requires tremendous amounts of time and water to extinguish, often placing garages and general traffic at risk. Electric cars and their batteries cause greater environmental damage than the gasoline cars they are intended to replace. Constant promises that improved technology is just around the corner have never been fulfilled. The public has generally not shown a willingness to accept these risks, costs, and harms.

Without any consensus, activists seek to impose this drastic change on all of us through the back door. There has been no vote on the electric car. There is no mandate. Yet, they can push the agenda anyway.

Bank Australia has a reputation for maintaining lending standards that follow leftist policy goals. It needs no public vote, legislative action, or even substantial market share to promote this initiative. The publicity exceeds the economic importance of Bank Australia’s decision. But that publicity may lead to more such actions throughout the West. We may one day wake up to a world in which we have lost our cars without ever having decided on such a drastic course. This change would eliminate the travel freedom we currently enjoy and even the ability to live beyond the gates of our old cities.

Bank Australia is not the only entity that attempts to take away our cars without our consent. California’s recent ban of gasoline cars by 2035 was accomplished by something called the California Air Resources Board, even though a CBS headline somehow referred to this fiat as a “vote” by “California.”

Unelected regulators who have achieved power in a one-party state unilaterally made the decision, without the consideration of the electorate. The influx of illegal aliens and the exodus of Americans fleeing the California chaos protects this one-party rule, and Democrats will face no consequences for creating this bureaucratic autocracy — there is no one to rein in the bureaucrats’ unchecked power.

Virginia will likely follow California’s lead despite the presence of a Republican governor and a partly Republican legislature. Democrat Ralph Northam, the prior governor, signed a law in 2021 that specifically tied Virginia’s regulatory bureaucracy to actions taken by the California Air Resources Board, so the current Virginia administration has no choice in the matter unless they take the previously unheard-of step of undoing an entrenched regulatory scheme.

The Virginia government yielded its authority to unelected regulators. Even worse, to California regulators. In a very important matter, Virginia is now under the control of a one-party state on the other side of the country. How many more states are, or soon will be, in the same situation?

Regulators and bureaucrats have long ruled the country. Voters maintained little control, despite their ability to send different congressmen to Washington or new legislators to their state capitals. But now the regulators have found a way to accumulate power over much of the country in one far left state that is quickly becoming dominated by foreign citizens. Virginia may ban gasoline cars because California will not control its border.

The regulatory attack on our cars perpetuates from the federal government also. Driverless cars may soon deprive us of our steering wheels and the freedom to control our own vehicles as soon as the regulators and technocrats connect the right GPS databases together. They need no further legislative action. You can bet that the bureaucrats’ driverless scheme will not include gasoline powered cars.

The Biden administration’s major energy initiative, shutting down the Keystone Pipeline, was also accomplished without a vote or a consensus, as Biden signed an executive order on his first day in office. We have all felt the subsequent limitations on our ability to afford gasoline and freely drive our cars.

The entrenched bureaucracy is part of the executive branch and acts almost independently of the other two branches. Congress unconstitutionally yielded its legislative power to the bureaucrats almost a century ago, while the states are apparently ceding their power to California.

If we lose our vehicles and accompanying travel freedom, it will happen without anyone asking our opinion or allowing us to exercise our right to vote. We will find ourselves in a position where we cannot afford to travel beyond the cities, forced to return and submit to the crime, taxes, congestion, and corruption that drove us away in the first place. No rational person would choose this course of action. Yet this is the goal of the Deep State and its allies across local governments and the corporate world.

Had a politician openly proposed to abolish gasoline cars and force us to move to the nearest big city, such a proposal would have been ignored or rejected. The Green New Deal was unanimously rejected by Republicans in the U.S. Senate in 2019, and the vote was labeled a political “stunt” by Green New Deal proponents at the time.

Those same proponents now impose the Green New Deal without a vote or a mandate. They equate open debate and voting as a “stunt” while favoring back door action. Nothing says “dictatorship” more than an executive branch acting unilaterally against the will of its people on matters vital to the people’s standard of living.

Is the situation hopeless? Is the dictatorship fully entrenched? It depends on whether we stay focused on what is at stake in every election. We must remember that electing any Democrat to any state or national office will hasten the day we lose our vehicles and travel freedom. We must remain focused on this issue no matter what distractions are thrown our way.

We must remember that electing a congressman or legislator who merely disagrees with the Green New Deal is not enough. Our elected officials must pledge to dismantle the bureaucratic schemes that are currently in place — not merely hold the line. The status quo is a one-way road to dictatorship. We are now moving on auto-pilot. If we allow distractions to prevent us from reversing those schemes, the regulators will end our way of life with little or no additional legislative action.

Image: Senate Democrats, via Flickr // CC BY 2.0