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wasted huge amounts of money and has had many more failures than successes. For

example, MITI's HDTV program spent $1 billion to define and dominate nextgeneration

HDTV. Some American executives immediately appealed to Congress to get their

corresponding piece of corporate welfare. The realities: (1) the United States won the

HDTV race with a superior digital design, and (2) the only digital TV deployed today is

not that burdensome, FCC-approved HDTV system but a digital enhancement of ordinary

television.14 MITI caused Japanese taxpayers (who live in homes with half the square feet

per person of American homes) to lose $1 billion on its HDTV boondoggle.

TRON was a nickname for a fifth-generation computer partially funded by MITI

that threatened to wipe out the U.S. computer industry. It turned out to be a loser, and

the U.S. computer industry remains dominant. MITI support of the Japanese aircraft and

biotech industries has also produced no tangible results.

MITI focuses on 13 Japanese industries. The four areas of heaviest emphasis are

textiles, mining, basic metals, and chemicals. Despite that, those areas ranked low--13th,

12th, 10th, and 9th, respectively--in growth rate among the 13 industries. In response to

the theory that MITI was not striving for growth in those industries but simply subsidizing

declining industries to ease their pain, Harvard economist David Weinstein stated, "But if

that is true, that makes Japanese industrial policy very like its French and American

counterparts over the past four decades--political-ly driven, favor-based, [and] non-helpful

to the nation's overall economic functioning."15

The economic model that says, "They've got subsidies; we need subsidies," is

exactly wrong. America will be relatively much more competitive if we allow the nations

with whom we compete to squander their taxpayers' money, while we encourage our

companies to win without subsidies. It's like the Olympics: there comes the day when an

athlete must walk alone into the arena of competition. The government cannot lift the

weights and run the miles that one must to be a champion--only an individual can.

The fact is that, in West European nations and Japan, the choice to take money

from citizens to pursue the "good ideas" of government has been consistently self-de-

structive to the economies. Socialism does not work. Socialism is immoral. We should

abandon socialist programs like corporate welfare.

The Corporate Welfare Juggernaut and Its Lobbyists

One of the biggest barriers to eliminating the corporate welfare drain is the pork-

barrel system itself: members of Congress are put in a lose-lose situation, forced to choose

between voting down a significant subsidy for a home-state corporation or voting to

continue corporate welfare. Congress recently faced the same situation in the downsizing

of the military. Individual senators were very reluctant to vote to close major bases in

their home states, yet everyone agreed that the Soviet collapse provided a great

opportunity to reduce spending on obsolete bases. The solution drafted by Rep. Dick