Letters to the Editor
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Smug Prius owners
As a smug Prius owner, I have to admit Jenkins has few points. We do pay a premium to have a “lifestyle” or “image” car. But nowhere near the premium that SUV owners pay for the same reason. SUV owners want a giant car that makes them look sexually available. Prius owners want to make a political statement with their cars, but make no mistake—the Prius is considered a sexy ride by many blue-staters.
Furthermore, most of us are quite aware that we are subsidizing Toyota. Sure, it allows them to sell more trucks, but we’ve also helped create a market for hybrids, with falling prices and rising production. We took one for the team, eyes wide open.
Will someone else use the oil? Of course. The oil is all going to be gone in a few decades (maybe a very few). But saying Prius owners are responsible for the oil being used faster is to blame us for other people’s behavior, which we oppose. That’s the trick of market rhetoric—it makes blame easy to move around. Markets give us freedom, or they make us utterly helpless; it all depends on the point the editorial writer is trying to make. It’s time to tell the truth, that market rhetoric is a shell game, and the WSJ editorial page is the shiftiest character on the corner.
One’s choice of a car is one of the very few ways an individual can make any sort of a difference. As long as we’re stuck in a country with Texas and Montana, we’re never going to have decent environmental laws. Owning a Prius (or four, as Leonardo Dicaprio once crowed, in a missing of the point that only the rich and out of touch could achieve) is nothing compared to not owning a car. Which is an impossibility for most of us. Would I have gotten a better deal on a Matrix? No question. But a Matrix says nothing.
Prius haters seem to think of my car as hippy-dippy. My image of it is more of a raised middle finger.