very few car companies have made it through the last decade without some form of government help.
So keeping dinosaur companies on life support with tax dollars is a good thing?
If the alternative is not enough supply to meet demand,yes. Private capital might be better, but how much would private firms be willing to risk on a new company? Also, could that company scale up to build 1 million cars per year to supply American demand?
GM was not run very intelligently in the '90s (and '80s and '00s), so I definitely feel the urge to let them die, but the economic damage of the 100,000+ layoffs would cost more than the auto bailout.
I don't understand this line of thinking, particularly from the Hacker News crowd.
Nobody seems to care if taxi drivers lose out from services like Lyft and Uber. It's called "disruption" and is apparently good for the economy.
A dinosaur like GM loses market share to imports and the same crowd thinks gov't subsidies are required to keep an inefficient industry alive.
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Plus I'm pretty sure the WSJ would be decry Tesla's stupidity if the left this money on the table. These incentives weren't designed fir Tesla, they just take advantage of them.