A similar thing happens when you take your Cummins diesel-equipped Ram truck in to be fixed, as Cummins is desperately trying to persuade some 630,000 owners of 2013-2018 Ram 2500 and 3500 pickups equipped with one of these engines to do.

The federal government says Cummins cheated federal emissions requirements – here we go again – which means the Cummins engines have been found to be not entirely compliant with federal emissions requirements. This effect of this noncompliance is trivial – in terms of any tangible harm done to "the environment," let alone any actual people.

Former Attorney General Merrick Garland – who led the persecution of Cummins – claimed that "preliminary estimates suggest that defeat devices on some Cummins engines have caused them to produce thousands of tons of excess emissions of nitrogen oxides." 

It sounds serious.

But it is the fact of noncompliance that was and is the real affront, as it was about ten years ago when VW was discovered to be noncompliant. Extreme repercussions followed – grossly disproportionate to any actual harm caused, which was not only never proved, it never had to be proved. This detail ought to be important to reasonable people. How can there have been a crime when no one was harmed?