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.
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.
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 markets, 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 (which doesn’t exist) wouldn’t have any subsidies.
Reminder that capitalism doesn’t mean free market.
That’s part of it, even if that’s not the only part.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
Sure, in the same way that a central characteristic of Communism is being a Stateless society, even though that part never seems to happen either (thanks, Lenin). “True Capitalism has never been tried before!”
I would argue that being horriblely disadvantaged by not getting free money is not in fact a restriction on the market.
That’s technically correct. It’s not a restriction. But it’s not a neutral for the market either.
Of course it’s not neutral, but we’re talking about wether or not it is comparable with unrestricted capitalism.