Cash for Clunkers a success??

President Obama has called the Cash for Clunkers project a "success." Let's examine that claim for a moment.

The program authorizes the Internal Revenue Service to seize wealth at gunpoint from productive, working Americans. Let's call a hard-working American in this group, Person A.

At the same time, there is a sector of society that owns old cars and might want to upgrade to a new car, benefitting from the government's Cash for Clunkers rebate. Somebody in this group would be Person B.

And then there are auto-makers, and their orbit of parts-suppliers, workers, and stock-holders. This is Group C.

So let's call the Cash for Clunkers program what it really is. It is a violent wealth dispersion program whereby Person A is robbed by men with guns in order to benefit Person B and all those in Group C.

Ron Paul recounts in his book The Revolution: A Manifesto (a MUST-READ), that pretty much all government programs work along these lines, and in the end, there is the forgotten man--Person A in our example above. Person A doesn't have a powerful lobby in Congress like Group C does. Person A gets robbed and others benefit.

Really, as seen in the example above, Government, as Murray Rothbard stated, is a gang of thieves writ large.

Also, it is worth noting that more often than not (contrary to popular belief as propagandized in U.S. History classes), government programs HURT the poor. So it is in the case of Cash for Clunkers. As Daniel McAdams points out, this program takes inexpensive automobiles off the market, and these are the kinds of cars that low-income or poor folks need. When you lower the supply of a good, it's price will rise. The poor will get to pay more for the automobiles they purchase. So there's another "forgotten man" in this economic equation of violence, theft, and oppression of the poor.

So, the president is correct that this has been a success. It does what government programs are intended to do: benefit some at the cost of others, and violently so, as taxation is an act of violence backed up by the coercive force of the state.

UPDATE 8/4: In this clip, Ron Paul adds to the discussion of this silly program: