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Comment by wbsss4412 | Hacker News Reader

> We don't live in a dictatorship and so absolutes like "never make an SUV" bans this don't really happen.

I can’t tell if you’re being hyperbolic, but banning SUVs isn’t a sign of a dictatorship, and it’s frankly a bit ridiculous to even make the comparison.

The US government has and does ban products all the time for all sorts of reasons. See: alcohol, marijuana/other drugs, incandescent bulbs, etc.

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I don't think it's terribly hyperbolic. OP wants to get rid of something he doesn't use and presents a black-and-white statement for why it's rational, but SUVs have so many proponents that the govt'd have to override all of them without their opinion weighing in to get it passed as law before they had a chance to kick you out of office. (See, say, the efforts in the 1970s to get the USA to use the metric system as an example.)

Is it possible? Yes, that's why I used the weasel words of "don't really happen" instead of "don't ever happen".

I also pointed out that the more likely way to get OP's way would be to continue raising taxes on those vehicles to illicit the same result without outright making SUVs illegal to produce.

That’s fair enough, I seem to have misread your original comment as “bans on things individuals like == dictatorship”, which is a common enough sentiment, unfortunately, that the connection is all to easy to make.

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