Over at Reason, John Stossel writes about the problem – a big, expensive one – of corporate welfare.
Particular businesses shouldn’t receive preferential treatment, including taxpayer handouts, from government. Taxes and fees should be lower across the board, and without preference for one corporation over another.
Corporate handouts only reduce competitiveness and increase dependency, and are illegitimate expenditures. There are a thousand better uses of public funds; corporate welfare is as wrong, wasteful, and destructive of American productivity as about anything government does.
Every dollar for corporate welfare increases the tax and debt burden on ordinary people, and distorts otherwise efficient markets in capital and labor.
Local versions of this kind of mistaken and wrongful spending can be found in so-called government development associations or rat holes of waste like our local tech park board.
(The work of the tech park board is so shameless that they don’t even have enough private businesses on whom to shower federal pork, so they’ve signed up public recipients of public money meant for private job creation.)
See, End Corporate Welfare.