I wrote a column on the issue, and National Review has an editorial. Let’s focus on a particularly egregious aspect of a plan only politicians could think up – namely, that economic destruction could be good for the economy.
In my column, I noted:
Fourth, there is the incredible waste of government deciding to destroy vehicles that still operate. Only politicians and their appointees could truly believe that destroying productive assets is good for the economy. As historian Burt Folsom has pointed out, it’s similar to the federal government’s subsidizing farmers, and then in 1948, “the overproduction was so dramatic that the bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture ordered surplus potatoes destroyed via public burnings.”
And National Review observed:
When we talk about government policies destroying wealth, we usually mean taxes that shift money from efficient to inefficient uses. Rarely do we mean the deliberate destruction of valuable assets. Yet, thanks to the Cash for Clunkers program, which ground to a halt yesterday, we now have a visual aid to help with this abstract concept. Mechanics tasked with destroying the so-called clunkers have been posting the videos on YouTube, often muttering in anger as they fill the engines of perfectly good Corvettes and Cadillacs with sodium silicate and then run them until they self-destruct. The goal of the Cash for Clunkers policy is, literally, the destruction of wealth.
Raymond J. Keating
Chief Economist
Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council
No comments:
Post a Comment