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When all else fails, there is always the “other countries do it” defence. Or as a government briefing paper put it, aerospace (like autos) is viewed as a “ ‘pay to play’ industry.” Subsidies are justified, in this view, to keep our side in the game. The possibility that the game is not worth playing does not seem to occur. The assumption, rather, is that we must be in aerospace. Why? Not for any economic reason. But for reasons of preference. Because aerospace is high-tech. Because it’s “value-added.” Because. That this essentially faith-based economics — God wants us to be in aerospace — is often defended in the name of pragmatism adds a certain irony to the proceedings.

In fact the willingness of other countries to subsidize their aerospace sectors is the best argument against our doing the same. If we were the only country on Earth to hit on this scheme, there might — conceivably, theoretically, hypothetically — be a case for subsidizing ours: given massive returns to scale, and the possibility of obtaining a worldwide monopoly, the returns might be so great as to turn a negative sum game into a positive. But as the same idea has occurred to other countries — countries with much deeper pockets than ours — then at best all we are doing is matching theirs.

This is a government that is very much concerned with presenting itself as new and different. But nothing would better signal the same old was just the same and twice as old than another planeload of money for Bombardier.

*Well, we could subsidize every industry, and Lord knows we’re half-way there. But the futility — in strictly arithmetic terms — of redistributing from everyone to everyone is surely apparent.