Fine, but how do you measure the pork? It is not just the subsidies, is not just the tax dollars not collected, it is a very large but unmeasurable opportunity cost. How many dollars from our economy were diverted to building electric cars rather than inventing and implementing the next steam engine? The next iPhone? The next cure for cancer?
How do we know that electric cars are desirable? Because there has been a concerted effort to sell the notion of climate change? How do we know that electric cars will significantly contribute to solving climate change? How do we measure this? When we divert great chunks of our economy to building electric cars or to building solar panels or windmills, how do we know? Where is the data, who connects the data points?
The genius of America up until the Great Depression (the building of the railroads not forgotten) was to leave these allocation of resources up to the free market. Leftists will tell us that the free market squanders money, they will tell us that it is more democratic to let the government decide where resources should be allocated. In other words, a few ignorant congress people or a few anointed experts in academia or in the bureaucracy know better where to spend our dollars than do those who earned them.
Actually, a housewife in the supermarket votes with her family's precious funds budgeted for shopping and casts her vote with every purchase. Her decision is far more democratic than those of a representative thousand miles away or a bureaucrat tucked away in the bowels of the deep state.
Decision-making by government has not worked out well in Russia, India, Cuba, Venezuela and in many parts of Latin America. The left will tell us that it has worked out well in China but one must consider that it originally worked out tragically in China and what has in fact worked out well in China has been a retreat from the mentality that the government knows best. Even while Russia was filling its gulags and starving millions of kulaks, the left was telling us that five-year plans were the future. FDR was a admirer of Mussolini.
So the left write books like The Affluent Society telling us that because we put chrome on cars rather than build bigger liberal arts colleges, these decisions should be taken away from us and bestowed upon our elected representatives, or their agents in the bureaucracy, all under the wise guidance of elite academics.
The human ego is a subject as old as Genesis and the Garden of Eden. The urge to play God is an undeniably powerful engine to the leftists whose corporal bodies are merely life-support systems for their drive for power.
All of the money that has been spent on Elon musk and his various schemes, or on windmills, on solar panels (favoring, coincidentally, major contributors to the Obama campaigns), is money not available for curing cancer.
We make these decisions without regard to the opportunity cost and without even the slightest accounting of the true costs much less the real need. This is not a question of building a bridge, this is a question of creating a whole new industry for which we cannot even begin to count the cost or begin to assess the actual need.
We cannot count the costs and we cannot begin to know the harm.
