Countervailing Calamity: How to Stop the Global Subsidies Race

You've heard of Solyndra, Government Motors, and the tens of billions of dollars transferred annually from U.S. taxpayers to America's wealthy agribusinesses—including the occasional farmer living in Manhattan. Worldwide, government subsidies to chosen industries and favored companies are out of control, bankrupting treasuries, breeding cronyism, misdirecting and deterring private investment, distorting market signals, and undermining support for capitalism and free trade. Always demanding more, domestic subsidy recipients cite foreign subsidies as grounds for yet more largesse, and the cycle continues. How will this global subsidies race end? "Very badly," according to experts who argue that policymakers must find a way to rein in this economically and politically corrosive process.