A driver takes Tesla Motors’ Model S all-electric car for a spin at Tesla’s manufacturing plant in Hawthorne, Calif.Who would have dreamed that the blessings of liberty included the privilege of helping multimillionaire actors and assorted fat cats pay for fashionable electric sports cars with our tax dollars? Certainly not the framers of the Constitution. The automobile didn’t exist at the time, but they had the sense to include the 10th Amendment, which strictly limited federal power and included nothing that could be construed as permitting subsidies for government-preferred vehicles.
No, it takes a Congress and a series of presidents who feel unbound by the Constitution to screw things up that badly.
Today, a handful of well-to-do motorists own costly vehicles made by heavily subsidized Tesla Motors.
But Tesla might not even be manufacturing the cars were it not for the — get this — $465 million loan it received from the U.S. Department of Energy.
It’s no secret that Washington funds all manner of “green energy” schemes, and impractical, unsustainably expensive electric cars are in the thick of the market-flouting silliness.