By Daniel Gross, Updated Saturday, October 10, 2009
In A Recession There Are Few Global-Warming-Denying Libertarians in the Boardroom...
Andrew Taylor, the CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, in many ways epitomizes the business establishment. His family is No. 32 on the Forbes 400, their $7 billion fortune built on allowing middle-class people to drive cheaply. He donates mostly to Republican candidates. But when it comes to energy prices, he holds a heretical view. In the past year, gas has swung from $4 to $2.50 a gallon, which has made it difficult for auto manufacturers (and rental companies) to predict whether consumers will desire fuel-sipping compacts or fuel-burning SUVs. It strikes Taylor that if the government were to guarantee a stable gas price of between $3 and $4 per gallon—through a high national gas tax like they have in Europe, for example—it might spur innovation and hasten the shift to electric cars. "Consumers would know what kind of car they want to buy, and manufacturers would know what to build," he says.
A few years ago, such talk—looking to European-style intervention in an iconic American market, passing on higher prices to consumers—would have been enough to mark Taylor as a traitor to his CEO class. But Taylor is what you might call a progressive businessman. Not Progressive in the old-school, Robert La Follette reforming sense. And not progressive in the new-school, fair-trade coffee, Huffington Post sense. Since the 1920s, it's been common to hear businesspeople speak of themselves as being small-p progressives—pragmatic, eager to use new technologies and improve systems, willing to work with government and labor, not antagonistic to change. And we seem to be in a progressive moment.
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