But some ham-fisted moron in the government decided that the Chevy Volt was The Answer To Our Oil Dependency Problem, and that Americans would be better off if we bought a million of them. So they used their influence, as the new owners and masters of GM to demand that production be set at an artificially high level, because surely sales would follow.
It is easy to be fooled by the efficiency of American manufacturers and markets. You have a million moving parts, and somehow the right number of Chevy Cruzes get built and the right number of Ford F-150s get built. It is easy to figure that the single decision to build them is what drove the millions of individual decisions to buy them, because we are hard-wired to think that the cause comes before the effect. So if you build 100,000 Chevy Volts, the buyers will deus ex machina appear, because the buyers always seem to magically appear for every other product.
What the ham-fisted government employee fails to realize is that these decisions are made by intelligent professionals, with decades of experience and using every market research trick and tool they can devise. They don't just pull a number out of a hat, because they are betting Billions of their own Dollars on getting the answer right.
And, of course, sometimes they get it wrong, and they lose their shirts. History is littered with companies that bet the wrong way on a market and failed.
But when you work for the government, and you are betting with somebody else's money, you can just pull an attractive sounding number out of your arse and figure it will all work out. And if it doesn't, it just means the taxpayer is on the hook for a little bit more, so it's no big deal.
“it just means the taxpayer is on the hook for a little bit more, so it’s no big deal.”....
And there-in lies the federal governments way of doing all business....Throw taxpayer money at a pet project and if it works fine if not what next can we throw money at?