A Mooted New Scheme

An editorial from the FT of London...

"Frédéric Bastiat, the great economic journalist, wrote in 1850 that although breaking a shopkeeper’s window seemed to generate economic activity, all it really did was enrich glaziers. Shattering shop-fronts does not raise aggregate demand. The British government has yet to learn this lesson. A mooted new scheme to pay consumers up to £2,000 if they have an old car broken up and replaced with a new one would be a wasteful, distortionary subsidy to automakers."

Read the rest here.