OK, let’s nip this nonsense in the bud right now: There should be no bailout public subsidies whatsoever for Pittsburgh’s struggling autonomous vehicle industry.
Fast on the heels of the sudden shuttering of Argo AI – a spectacular failure of a robustly and privately funded operation — the Post-Gazette reports on how a Carnegie Mellon professor and the head of a nonprofit trade group advocating for driverless vehicles appear to want to throw public money at what the private market said was not ready for prime time.
“Are we going to stay Roboburgh?” the professor asks. “This would be an excellent time for the city and state to decide we want to keep robotics alive in Pittsburgh.”
Added the trade group fella:
“You need leadership at the governor’s level, you need leadership at the city level, the federal level,” he said. “It needs to be a priority.”
Again, this certainly sounds like folks with a vested interest in autonomous vehicle development asking for a public handout.
And the response from the City of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania must be a resounding “NO!”
Argo burned through billions of dollars and could not bring to market in a timely fashion the product it was developing. Investors pulled the plug and Argo was forced to trip its own circuit breaker.
That’s how the marketplace works, ladies and gentlemen. Who in their right mind would believe that government now can – or even should – step in with taxpayer money and prop up a failure? Those filled with such hubris that they believe government can command markets and that all it takes is more money, public money, that’s who.
Heck, even Allegheny Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald gets this one right. Well, almost. Again, from the P-G story:
“’This is going to be driven by market forces,’ said Mr. Fitzgerald, adding that there may be future discussions with the city’s robotics industry. ‘Right now, quite frankly, it’s an industry that needs a return’ on investment.”
No kidding. But “return on investment” or not, those in government have no warrant on the public purse to prop up an enterprise that the marketplace rejected, in toto.
Period.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
