Car socialism alive and well

Extracted in it's entirety from a media release I received today.

Once upon a time, there was a country whose government had decided in all its wisdom that it was going to be good at making cars. It designed precisely one model and started producing it. And it kept building this car for three decades. There was so much demand for the car that people added their children’s names to the waiting lists at birth. Or was it just that production was so inefficient?

The car in question was, of course, the infamous East German Trabant. Notoriously unreliable, uncomfortable, and hopelessly out of date even at the time it was introduced, it became the clearest demonstration that governments should stay out of the car industry.

The sort of communism that brought the world cars like the Trabant has long gone, the Soviet bloc has disappeared, but we still have politicians who think they are the better car managers.

The latest politician is none other than US President Barack Obama.

This week the US government announced its support for little-known car manufacturer Fisker. The company will receive more than half a billion US dollars in subsidised loans to build a hybrid sports car.

Never mind that at a retail price of US$89,000 the car will be out of reach of most consumers. Ignore the fact that sports cars are not really green cars. And forget that Fisker does not have much experience in building cars anyway.

What matters more than a viable business plan in these days of reborn socialism are your political connections. Or was it just a strange coincidence that one of Fisker’s top investors is former US Vice President Al Gore? It doesn’t hurt that his quest to save the world from climate change is incidentally helping fill his coffers with taxpayer cash.

The socialism of times past we have buried, but its flawed ideas are still haunting us from its grave.