THE VW CUTTERS

I hate whiners who deliberately use their influence with the people's elected and unelected commissars to make the free market the sick and twisted un-level playing field that it has become in the hands of government and regulators. A sad case in point is the way Leonid Bershidsky, a writer at Bloomberg View moans about how VW and others influenced the unelected ruling class in Europe in order to push their advantage in automotive diesel engines. Leonid says that they should be punished for using their influence.

The Volkswagen emissions scandal has broader implications than the potential damage it can do to Europe's biggest carmaker. It's the result of Europe backing the wrong emissions-reducing technology on a regulatory level. There is now an opportunity to reverse that error and force the continent's сar manufacturers to concentrate on hybrid and electric vehicles. They've got the technology and resources to reshape the market. 

The scandal is about VW's bad business decision to cheat testing equipment so it could rush new engine models to market in the U.S. It is also about a failure of regulatory oversight and testing technology. Most of all, however, it's about diesel engines: They were the ones performing so badly on the tests that VW engineers had to look for a workaround so marketers could trumpet the advent of "clean" diesel.  

VW had an advantage in diesel technology, which it wanted to leverage in the U.S., for a reason. In the mid-1990s, the European Commission and European Union member countries' governments started a campaign of massive intervention to stimulate the use of diesel engines in cars. At the beginning of that decade, Europe and Japan had about 10 percent of diesel automobiles on the road.

It's funny how the whiners always object to 'other' people using their influence on the government but see no harm, no foul when they do it themselves.