When the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick dragged his landlord before the Cambridge Rent Control Board, Murray Rothbard, who also lived in a rent-controlled apartment and also did philosophy, argued that there is a moral difference between accepting a subsidy and agitating for one. “One is living your life within a State-created matrix, while trying to work against the system,” Rothbard wrote in a 1987 issue of Liberty. “The other is actively using the State to benefit yourself and screw your fellow man, which means initiating and abetting aggression and theft.”
Christians might call this being in the world but not of it. Rothbard called it “rationality and good sense” to take a handout you never asked for. In that spirit, I recently set out to learn what federal subsidies my wife and I might be able to collect under the High-Efficiency Electric Homes and Rebates Act, which was tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a 2022 law that I think is bad.
The short answer is “none.” And while it might just be the sour grapes talking, my investigation left me wondering why so many other homeowners are eligible.
[Same here, largely because I don’t want to spend $25,000 to save $2500. That’s actually what the IRA does, if you navigate the subsidies the way that Riggs did in this column. I did replace my windows in 2009 to get credit from Obama’s ARRA, but I spent the $6000 on that because my windows actually WERE shot and we desperately needed to replace them for Minnesota’s winters. The $1500 I saved on taxes — it may have been less — wasn’t really a factor. That brings us to the main conclusion Riggs reaches here, which is that all these do is subsidize purchases that likely would have been made anyway, and only by people wealthy enough to make them without need of subsidies. — Ed]
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