A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.
A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.
Subsidies are by definition not a restriction on bad behavior but an incentive. There is no reason a company can’t ignore a subsidy if it doesn’t want to.
Subsidies skew the market toward specific sectors, technologies, or actors. A company that do not benefit from subsidies is at a competitive disadvantage vs a company that do get subsidies.
A totally free market wouldn’t have any subsidies. But markets aren’t totally free in practice.
Subsidies are typically a good thing when it benefits cleaner tech or improving energy efficiency. It’s the fossil fuel subsidies that do the most harm.
Reminder that capitalism doesn’t mean free market.
That’s part of it, even if that’s not the only part.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
Sure, in the same way that a central characteristic of Communism is being a Stateless society, even though that part never seems to happen either (thanks, Lenin). “True Capitalism has never been tried before!”
I would argue that being horriblely disadvantaged by not getting free money is not in fact a restriction on the market.
That’s technically correct. It’s not a restriction. But it’s not a neutral for the market either.
Of course it’s not neutral, but we’re talking about wether or not it is comparable with unrestricted capitalism.