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Notes -
I've definitely seen it argued frequently that electric cars were straight upgrades to gasoline cars and that it was inevitable that almost everyone would voluntarily switch to electric cars over time. The federal subsidies for electric cars were somewhat based on this idea, that once you got production ramped up and economies of scale kicked in that people would want to switch. That's a very different type of government intervention from straight up banning the competition. And even if it wasn't a different type of government intervention it's certainly on a different scale. Gas cars are so common that banning them (or 60% of them) is just completely unprecedented in my lifetime at least.
That said I think that requiring catalytic converters on cars or scrubbers on powerplants are also massive government interventions that should have been mandated by acts of congress and not unelected department head.
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