The Wall Street Journal has an interesting review of the government's Cash for Clunkers program in which they claim that the program made the country $1.2 billion dollars poorer. Here's the heart of it:
The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, "Economics in One Lesson," you can't raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.
The first sentence holds an economic (read stewardship) lesson for all of us.
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