The end of Public Electric Vehicle Charging Stations in Blue States and Blue Cities

(or why we can’t have nice things)

Thieves have disabled EV Charging Stations time after time. In red states, the police can prosecute the thieves. In blue states, they can’t. There are a vast network of relationships that allow society to work. Making changes to a well-integrated society is frighteningly dangerous. In short, there are a vast number of ways to make things worse, and only a few ways to make society better. Elections have consequences. One consequence is that we might not be able to have public charging stations for EVs.

Thieves have been stealing the heavy cables from EV charging stations. They take a few hundred dollars of copper each night. In some cities, that earns you a misdemeanor where the police hand out a ticket and the judge issues you a fine. Before you’re fined, you must first be identified, located, arrested, booked, charged, tried, and convicted. Most of the thieves are never caught and prosecuted. If they are arrested, most of the criminals have no cash or bank balance that can be seized to pay their fine. They don’t have property that can be levied or regular wages that can be garnished.

Ignoring “small” crimes is a new problem, a new experiment. We used to have laws against theft and vandalism. Blue State Democrats got rid of those laws in the name of reducing the fraction of young men who went to jail. Instead of making society safer, their soft on crime laws made it impossible to have any public infrastructure. Many businesses had to close.

Grocery and drug stores closed in Big Blue cities where shoplifting was tolerated. We can’t have public EV charging stations either.  I’m reminded of the time I was hiking in the hills above Santa Cruz, California. I stumbled over a pot growing operation. The druggies were not worried about fertilizer runoff. We can’t even have clean open spaces when we don’t enforce the laws we have. Society is more precarious than we thought.

Imagine I gave you a hammer or wrench or a saw. Then I pointed you at a helicopter and told you to make the machine better. There are a thousand things you could do and almost none of them would make the helicopter more useful. Almost all of the changes would make the aircraft more dangerous. The good news is that few of us pretend to be experienced helicopter designers, machinists, or mechanics. Now consider that a helicopter is trivially simple when compared to the society in a small town. Boastful Democrat Politicians picked up a hammer and broke many of our major cities.

With the help of the press, these politicians broke a society they couldn’t create in the first place. They did it time after time and the news media cheered them on. The politicians issued a series of excuses packaged as a press release and the press reprinted it without question.

You don’t need to be an experienced political scientist to figure out why most new ideas fail. A single celled organism is one of the simplest forms of life that we know. Making random changes to the cell’s genetic code is almost always fatal. Those changes kill the cell or its offspring. It is vastly easier to introduce a fatal flaw than to create an improvement. You knew that if you read the textbook and listened in your high school biology class.

Somehow, we forget the obvious when a Democrat politician proposes another untested experiment wrapped up with a wonderful title. We assumed that these politicians were both thoughtful and that they cared about our society. We were wrong. They care deeply about getting reelected. They care about leaving a good impression and avoiding blame.

In blue states, fewer young men and women are able to start a family and buy a home. The things they buy cost more and the jobs they can get pay less. It is harder than ever to start a small company. Some of our public spaces are unusable due to crime and homelessness. Working citizens are fleeing our Democrat controlled cities. If all the EV charging cables are cut, they can’t even drive away in their electric cars.

Unless the voters start paying attention, I don’t know if our society will survive these experiments.