DeSantis Exempts Elon Musk’s Tesla from Florida Car Sales Law

The National Post ^ | June 16, 2023 | JACK MONTGOMERY

[poconopundit]

Good analysis, qaz123. Found an interesting story on the total $ value of American parts/content in cars sold in the United States.

Most major car makers covered in the research are making cars with between 55% to 70% American content/parts. Based on publicly available info, the factors in the analysis include:

• profit margin (if the headquarters are based in the U.S. the assumption is that the profits remain in the country.)
• Labor: where the car is assembled
• Research and development location
• Inventory, capital and other expenses.
• Where the engine is produced
• Where the transmission is produced
• Body, chassis, and electrical components

Here's the story: Cars That Are Most 'Made in America'

One weak point of this research is they don't even mention Toyota, the leading sedan manufacturer in America.

For what it's worth...

[Tijeras_Slim]

There’s a similar law in New Mexico, Tesla opened stores on Indian Reservations since they’re sovereign nations.

[skr]

Tesla isn’t the only exception, as per the article, despite the headline. Other EV manufacturers are also exempt since they never had a dealer network to start with. This bill is only about the traditional car manufacturers who already have franchises in place. It’s to protect the dealerships from competing with the factories who were paid from 30k to 500k for franchise fees.

[devere]

I agree with you, but there are many ways in which government may protect politically active participants in the marketplace. Some of these are professional licensing, limited liquor licenses, etc. A free market works best for the public, but I don’t expect any one politician to work miracles.

[TBP]

I disagree with DeSantis on this, but it’s not “corruption.” Tesla has a different business model and doesn’t use dealers.

[TBP]

If I were running a car company, I’d open my own dealerships.

[The Duke]

And I suppose you don’t mind a handful of national banks displacing local banks?

And, while I have not owned a great many companies, I have owned an international engineering company (and seem to be in the process of starting a new one), So I’m familiar with capitalism.

[ConservativeInPA]

And I suppose you don’t mind a handful of national banks displacing local banks?

Actually, that’s exactly what I am against. The reason big banks exist is because of government. It’s government picking winners, and when that occurs there’s always a loser. Take the failures of SVB, Signature and 1st Federal. The government in collaboration with the Fed socialized the bad assets of these banks and privatized the good assets. The good assets went to big banks. You and I had to pay for the bad assets.

There are many other reasons why there are substantially fewer small banks today than 40 years ago, but all of the major reasons are government laws and regulations.

Government’s involvement in capitalism should be protecting the mechanisms of markets, not protecting and regulating businesses. This is similar to protecting our individual rights. What is the greatest threat to individual rights and free markets? Government. Government is the problem.

What do I mean by government protecting the mechanisms of markets. All markets have a method to enter and exit. That’s starting a business and getting out of business, or investing in a business and selling that investment. Information, specifically the goal of perfect information, needs to be protected. The government’s role is to prosecute those that falsely represent products, but not limit information.

Since you asked me about big banks, I’ll use that as an example where government law and regulation, specifically Dodd-Frank, limit information to individual investors, while banks have more perfect information. Banks use more complete market information, which includes details of individual and small investors’ stop-loss and limit prices where small investors don’t have he same information.

That’s just one of the many ways government does not protect and promote the same information to everyone in a market. That allows big banks to grow bigger and in the process keep small individual investors down. Dodd-Frank also makes it difficult to enter trading securities as a business. That is done by requiring capital minimums. So a person who has, say $20k, is not allowed to trade multiple times per week, but he can give his $20k to a big bank and the have nearly no limits what they can do. There are also restrictions that keep small investors out of entire markets.

This crap is sold by politicians as protecting investors, but it is merely facilitating big banks getting bigger so they can give bigger donations to politicians. I don’t want to be protected. I’ll do that myself, and if I mistakes, I’ll learn from those mistakes. So the bottom line to me is government basically needs to limit barriers of entry and exit for businesses, which is basically getting out of the way. And government needs to promote perfect information. That is fighting and punishing fraud, and insuring all parties involved in business transactions have the same information about product and price is available. That extends across all products, so choices can be made between fundamentally different products.