And of course the Bastiat/Hazlitt “unseen” is the countless efficient jobs which were destroyed by the subsidy’s deflection and those which will never come about.
The liberals will say many more jobs would have been destroyed if we let them fail. That is one of the main arguments for having bailed them out.
How did they measure these two amounts to conclude which was more utilitarian? We, on the other hand, can know that subsidies can only take a dollar out of the hand of someone who, by definition, had a better use for it before it was taken away from him, and redirect funds from the efficient to the inefficient. So we can conclude that taxpayers lose at least as much as GM gained via bailout, and no one can measure the jobs not brought into production due to withdrawing the funds from efficient use.
I know it’s so stupid. GM sold how much in assets and got rid of how many expenses, and made just 1.3 billion? So next year I assume they will already be in the red again?