I'm John Bachelors with my colleague Terry Anderson of the Hoover Institution with Dominic

Parker, his colleague at Hoover, presenting markets, mandates, and incentives for the environment.

We've been working on the green mandates having to do with, for example, in California there is a mandate

about at such and such a date in the near future all

cars will be EVs. There's a trade-off whenever there is a mandate and there is

less of a trade-off and certainly a market-oriented decision when there is incentives

for that.

So what could go wrong, Terry?

Let's deal with the wrong part first.

What could go wrong with too many mandates and no incentives?

What happens?

Well, sitting up the Hoover Institution, I'll start with mandates, infringe on our individual freedom to make decisions about what

the kind of car we want, when we want to turn off the light, how much water we want

coming out of our tap. Now that we always have constraints on our

freedoms. I can't punch you in the nose, that's a constraint. And so the

question is not whether we'll have our freedoms restricted, but will it be

restricted more than necessary and mandates restrict freedom to make choices.

And in some cases, especially large number of cases

like air pollution, a mandate to say clean up the air in Los Angeles is a way of getting the good produced, clean air, and it requires force.

On the other hand, markets can solve some of these conflicting uses and do it with people voluntarily. That means gaining when they engage in transactions, deciding what

they want.

And we have moved the needle way towards mandates from everything for from the automobile fleet to to

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