David E. Davis, Jr. on Cash for Clunkers

In the December 2009 issue of Car and Driver (article not available online), David E. Davis, Jr. lambasts the wildly popular "cash for clunkers" program:

Not until the government got involved was anyone stupid enough to pour sodium silicate into the engines of the trade-ins on used-car lots and render them useless except as junk to be sold by the pound.

A fleet of American used cars like, say, 1977 Chevrolet Caprices could be shipped to any country in the Third and Fourth Worlds and would revolutionize the way people live. Women with sick children would not be hitchhiking 50 miles to clinics.

Of course, the environment is far more important than a few million poor foreigners. The government bureaucrats, in their seemingly never ending quest to absolutely perfect their abilities to do evil, work tirelessly to minimize any actually good secondary effects from their actions.