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.
They’ve been abandoned not because obsolete but because the unlimited unrestricted capitalism ordered to build a service that nobody wanted to use because “we must grow and be the first to hit the market whatever it takes”
Capitalism dictates maximizing profit by any means, including taking free money from the government.
A government giving out targeted free money, is not an “unrestricted capitalism” government.
China, is an aggressively capitalist society, colliding with a strongly communist facade. Or a disaster in slow motion.
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.
