Detroit — In outlining a plan to fundamentally reorder America’s economy under a centralized, carbon-capped, command-and-control regime, John McCain reaffirms why free-market conservatives are deeply suspicious of his candidacy.

“For all of the last century, the profit motive basically led in one direction – toward machines, methods, and industries that used oil and gas,” he said Monday at an Oregon wind farm. “Enormous good came from that industrial growth, and we are all the beneficiaries of the national prosperity it built. But there were costs we weren’t counting, and often hardly noticed. And these terrible costs have added up now, in the atmosphere, in the oceans, and all across the natural world.”

This extraordinarily arrogant statement expresses a fundamental misunderstanding of how America rode industrial growth to wealth. In fact, without “national prosperity” the U.S. would have been unable to tackle the “costs” of industrialization – an effort that, today, finds Americans living longer and healthier than at any time in history.

Take the enormous good Detroit alone has created.

For “all of the last century” it has been an engine of American growth because “the profit motive led in one direction.” But if Detroit had labored under McCain’s massive cap-and-trade bureaucracy at the turn of the century, it is unlikely it would have created the prosperous product we take for granted.

The gas-driven automobile was the result of ruthless competition among entrepreneurs, their experiments, and their failures. Backed by millions in investment dollars, these men were driven by efficiency and profit.

Detroit entrepreneurs were not alone in the race for a marketable horseless carriage. “In the East,” writes Robert Conot in American Odyssey, recounting Thomas Edison’s trip to meet Henry Ford in 1896, “automobile experimentation was centered on steam and electric-powered vehicles. Experience with storage batteries had convinced Edison that electric vehicles were impractical. He questioned Ford closely.”

And enormous good came.

Burning through investor money, Ford’s carbon-based, gas-powered technology – in competition with fellow gasoline entrepreneurs at Olds and Cadillac – eventually won out over steam and electrics because is was faster, more reliable, and cheaper.

But Ford’s design was helped by another unforeseen, free-market development – the explosion in carbon-based oil exploration across America’s southwest. Writes Conot: “The price of gasoline kept dropping, and automobiles become more and more economical to operate.”

And enormous good came.

This lead to a revolution in American society as the car became an affordable product for most Americans, not just the wealthy. From 1909 to 1914, Ford sales went from 10,000 cars to 500,000!

This explosion in production in turn created the opportunity for Ford’s $5-a-day wage, opening America to a new, assembly-line-fueled era of prosperity. But these assembly lines, in turn, needed massive amounts of cheap electricity to operate machinery. Into this void came industrial utilities, once again taking advantage of the cheapest, most efficient mineral in America: carbon-based coal.

But with so many cars hitting the road, the country struggled to keep up with road construction – an effort greatly advanced by Albert Kahn’s carbon-intensive “demonstration of the workability of reinforced concrete construction,” writes Conot.

And enormous good came.

The result of this extraordinary, unfettered entrepreneurism was that the U.S. leap-frogged Europe (where the auto was invented) in auto production – producing more autos than the rest of the world combined by 2010. This explosion in wealth is what every other country on the planet envies to this day, and that China and India are right now trying to recreate in their own nascent, carbon-driven auto industries.

Yet, under a command-and-control regime envisioned by McCain, it is unlikely that America’s efficient business climate would have existed because its entrepreneurism needed cheap energy sources to advance every step of the way. Without “profit as the primary motive,” resources would have been diverted to government lobbying, government would have picked winners and losers, and the automobile would not have become the egalitarian consumer product it is today.

And here lies the ultimate irony: Without its mass-produced auto wealth, Detroit would not have been able to afford to clean up its air, its rivers, its grasslands.

Free-markets dictated Detroit’s exploitation of oil, coal, and concrete to deliver the automobile’s enormous good even as it contributed to – if we accept the alarmists’ claims – a man-made increase of one degree in one century. What were the “terrible costs” of that one degree, and, in retrospect, would Sen. McCain have discouraged Detroit’s carbon choices to prevent them?