The price of hybrid would go up, profit on hybrid motors would be higher than regular motors, and here's your manufacturer incentive. Consummer would have the same money if taxes were lowered elsewhere.
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Hybrids are a clever marketing ploy. The US government provided $800 million dollars the the "Big Three" to create hybrid cars, the most practical offering by Chrysler was a five passenger sedan which cost @$70,000 and was the equivalent to a $20,000 Intrepid. Toyota and Honda aggressively promote their hybrids, but actually make very few, since it is estimated each car is sold at a $20,000 loss to the company (a Prius costs @ $36,000 new here, so it tracks the US experience fairly closely). There are niche markets where a hybrid makes sense (military and security vehicles come to mind, since they require lots of on board electricity and may need to move silently for short distances), but those customers are willing to pay for the special features.
begbie said:
Of course, most of these works, if not all of them, fall in what economists call the 'Austrian' school of economics. However, there are many other schools of economic thought out there that differ; sometimes dramatically. The Austrian school falls very much in line with most Libertarian thinking (as I know it). Hands-off government thinking and let the market handle everything. But there are at least 6 other schools of thought.
Since Marxists and Keynesian's have been discredited in the "real world", we are left with variations of classical economics (Adam Smith; The Wealth of Nations). I find the Austrian school tracks fairly well with the real world, not to mention the use of ordinal metrics which makes it easier to understand for the math challenged like me
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Getting back to the original question of the thread, Ignatieff is simply playing on people's general ignorance of economics, and particularly the Canadian public tendency to embrace "stateist" solutions and discount direct and indirect losses attributable to government interventions (particularly since past governments have become experts in playing shell games to pass costs and losses to others, and can always pull out the anti American card to distract the public when required).