In National Review’s “Capital Matters,” CEA President John Mozena used the announcement that EV automaker Lordstown Motors had filed for bankruptcy to tell the tale of an Ohio auto assembly plant that epitomizes the futility of politicians and bureaucrats trying to overcome business realities with taxpayer-funded subsidies.
The recent announcement that the artisanal-EV-pickup-truck manufacturer had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy marked the end of a wild ride that began with the purchase of a former General Motors manufacturing plant with money borrowed from GM itself, saw its peak as the company used a reverse merger to go public in the SPAC boom of 2020, and then crashed back to earth as the company’s stock was delisted from NASDAQ earlier this year after it had fallen thousands of vehicles short of its manufacturing targets.
It also closed the latest chapter in the sad and often infuriating story of Lordstown Assembly, the workers who occasionally got to build cars there, and the politicians who loved to give companies millions and millions of dollars in taxpayer money to promise they’d keep voters employed there. It’s a modern public-policy farce, rife with players that are themselves the protagonists of their own economic-development horror stories.