The Biden Administration is celebrating the first anniversary of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocates trillions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to industries of their choice. Welcome to five-year plans.
While guest-lecturing in Moscow one cold March night in 1993, a student asked why western firms didn’t invest more in Russia. I had just finished my PhD Dissertation on the subject of US-Russian joint ventures, so I probably gave a long, boring answer, that ended with an observation that in Russia, it was hard to make plans. One bright student quipped, “We used to have plans. Five-year plans.” And the whole room erupted in laughter.
When I tell that story in my classes in the US, no one laughs. That’s because the Biden administration has just launched their version of “five-year plans.” They won’t work. I explain the failure of the Soviet socialist five-year plans in the classroom by asking a student who might be wearing a Patrick Mahomes Kansas City Chiefs jersey, “Will Mahomes be with the Chiefs in five years? Will they be in the Super Bowl in five years? Will they still be the Kansas City Chiefs in five years, or will they move to another city?” Students quickly get the idea that five-year plans are dumb because no one knows what jersey will be demanded in five years. Yet, five-year plans require that you make that prediction.
That statement from former House Speaker Dick Armey should be on the wall of every congressperson in DC. “The reason markets are smart is because they aggregate all the information available from every possible producer and consumer. Markets are where everyone votes. Isn’t that a good way to solve problems? Wasn’t that how the congressional representative was elected? We hear cries continually about “threats to democracy.” Well, the recent flood of money into narrowly specified industries is a threat to the democratic medium that we call the market. Why should only government elites get to vote? What’s wrong with “one person, one vote?” Because that’s what happens in a market. Here’s how economist Friedrich von Hayek explained it, “The advantage of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources - labor, capital, and human ingenuity - in a manner that can’t be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner.”
When our house was built in 1999, the owner wanted to be “ahead of the curve,” so he ran three physical hard wires to every room: TV, telephone, and internet. We don’t use any of them. The investment was wasted. As the trillions of dollars in funding through the Inflation Reduction Act will be wasted. The Biden administration’s commitment to broadband, the power grid, and electric vehicles will suffer the same fate. No one knows which technology will dominate in the future.
“Predictions are difficult, especially those about the future,” quipped Danish Physicist Nils Bohr. But that doesn’t seem to slow the economic humanism that’s behind the motivation that encourages governmental bureaucrats to pick winners and losers. Speaking of those Kansas City Chiefs, would any reasonable person suggest that the government put their enormous resources behind ONE of the 32 teams in the NFL? Of course not, that would destroy the league. What do you think providing $28 billion via the Chips Act will do to the semiconductor industry?
When Milton Freidman popularized the phrase, “There is no free lunch,” he was making the point that trillions of dollars forcefully extracted from taxpayers are dollars that could have gone to other investments. Financial folks expect a return on their investment that is equal to, or above the average rate of return. Government subsidies perform well below that expected rate. Thus, every dollar that is committed to a government subsidy - on average - underperforms. That makes all of us poorer.
Solyndra is a classic example of governmental elites trying to predict the future. The solar panel manufacturer received $535 million in loan guarantees. When it failed, President Obama observed that he didn’t know which technologies would prevail. He’s right, he does not know. But the market does. The half-billion dollars that President Obama flushed down the Solyndra toilet was forcefully extracted from obedient, tax-paying citizens by the use of power. That’s why we should rely on the market.
When the market works, investors willingly contribute their own assets, by choice.
So it’s pretty simple: Would you rather have a society operated by power, or by freedom? That’s why it’s called free market capitalism. Another warning from the economist Hayek, “I regard the preservation of free markets, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind.” Or as Whole Foods founder John Mackey said, “Capitalism is humanity’s greatest invention.” Then, government subsidies are humanity’s worst invention.
