David McElroy

When I first heard about the “cash for clunkers’ program two years ago, I thought it might be satire. It sounded too much like a real-life example of Bastiat’s broken window fallacy to be real. But the politicians really were that stupid.

In case you don’t remember, the program was sold as a way to help the economy and the environment at the same time. The idea was to get people to bring in their used cars and buy new ones — with the government giving $3,500 credit on each deal. Selling new cars was supposed to stimulate the economy, and getting newer cars (getting slightly better gas mileage) was supposed to help the environment. Just don’t think about details such as cost and possible unintended consequences.

Taxpayers ended up spending about $3 billion on the program. How did it work out? A new study suggests that it was a waste of money. (Get a PDF of the study here.) The paper estimates that nearly half of the money went to people who would have bought a car even without the taxpayer subsidies. It also suggests that the program increased average fuel efficiency in the country by just 0.65 miles per gallon.

There are two issues that don’t seem to be mentioned often enough in the context of this program. One is about pure waste. The other is about the harm the program had on low-income families.

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Pretty much every time Ron Paul explains his views about foreign policy to mainstream Republican audiences, the response is grumbling at best and boos at worst. Other candidates talk about Paul’s “isolationist” views being naive. It turns out, though, that foreign policy experts say he’s right.

Being right rarely has anything to do with getting elected to office, of course, so Paul still has no chance of being elected. In fact, no libertarian has a chance of becoming president, because the vast majority of people simply don’t want individual liberty.

Still, it’s nice to see ABC News run an article over the weekend quoting foreign policy experts explaining why Paul is right about not invading other countries and leaving them alone to settle their own disputes. The real question is why it’s “controversial” — in the word’s of the story’s headline. The headline isn’t wrong. But why is it controversial to quit invading other countries and use our military purely to defend our own territory?

For those of you who still believe in the majoritarian political system and support Paul — thinking that he’s suddenly going to change people’s minds to see the truth as we see it — this is another piece of evidence that an electoral strategy isn’t going to work. We have a candidate who’s telling the truth, who’s making a case that’s both moral and pragmatic, and who was also warning about U.S. policy inviting terrorist attacks before 2001. You have experts on the subject who are willing to say that he’s right. You have news media people who are willing to quote him and quote those experts. Still, voters don’t hear. Why? Because people don’t want the same things you and I want.

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Folks on the progressive left seem to see Joe Therrien’s story as a tragedy. I agree that it’s a tragedy, but for very different reasons than the ones laid out in the left-wing publication The Nation last week.

Therrien is a part of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Listen to his story and see if you can spot the tragic part.

Just a few years ago, Therrien had a full-time job as a drama teacher in a government-run elementary school in New York City. He was unhappy with the working conditions — too many students, not enough resources and lousy management — so he decided to go to graduate school instead. He spent the next three years studying his passion — puppetry — while he ran up $35,000 in debt.

After emerging from the University of Connecticut with a master’s degree in puppetry, he was apparently shocked to find that he couldn’t find a job. We all know that jobs for good puppeteers should be available pretty much anywhere, but the evil rich have dried up the market. Or something like that. Therrien says he couldn’t find a job, so he ended up applying for his old job at the NYC elementary school. As you might have heard, times are tough, so schools aren’t exactly creating new positions left and right, so he ended up taking a job as a full-time substitute teacher at his old school — at about half his former salary.

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