Court Opinion

ID: 9782566
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 18:57:15.481951+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:35:05.244552
License: Public Domain

Smith, J. (dissenting).
I heartily join Judge Pigott’s dissent, and add a few words to vent my own frustration at today’s result.
It is an illusion—one that seems to have the persistence of original sin—that prosperity can be attained by taking money from taxpayers and handing it to favored businesses. A recent article restates well-established economic doctrine: “The idea of government intervention to influence the composition of a country’s output has long been derided by economists for breeding inefficiency, reducing competition, encouraging lobbying and *323saddling countries with factories producing products nobody wants” (Tinker; tailor, Economist, Oct. 1, 2011, available at http://www.economist.com/node/21530958 [last visited Nov. 9, 2011]).
The New York Legislature’s devotion to this self-destructive practice is no small matter. Among the expenditures at issue in this case is one described by the State as a commitment of “$140 million to support the construction of a wafer packaging facility and continued research and development efforts” to a joint venture of which International Business Machines Corporation is a member. This expenditure, it is said, will “result in the creation of at least 675 jobs” and the “retention” of 1,400 others. That works out to roughly $60,000 of state money per job. Another is an expenditure of $300 million to help an “international consortium of semiconductor manufacturers” expand a research and development program. This, we are told, will result in the creation of 450 jobs and the saving of 250 others: more than $400,000 per job. And the brief of defendant Globalfoundries U.S., Inc. discloses that the Legislature has appropriated $650 million to subsidize that company’s semiconductor manufacturing (an appropriation distinct, as far as I can tell, from the $300 million semiconductor subsidy described by the State). Global-foundries says that its manufacturing facility “is expected to employ more than 1,500 people, with an additional 5,000 jobs created by supplier firms”—implying a cost to the State of roughly $100,000 per job.
I seem to remember a time when IBM could make money by selling its products for more than it cost to produce them. I would have thought semiconductor manufacturers could do the same. If they cannot, a bailout for their shareholders is not a prudent use of more than a billion dollars in taxpayer funds.
Of course, the New York Legislature, so long as it stays within constitutional limits, is free to disregard both received economic teachings and common sense. I have defended before, and will no doubt defend again, the right of elected legislators to commit folly if they choose. But when our Legislature commits the precise folly that a provision of our Constitution was written to prevent, and this Court responds by judicially repealing the constitutional provision, I think I am entitled to be annoyed.
*324Chief Judge Lippman and Judges Ciparick, Graffeo and Read concur with Judge Jones; Judge Pigott dissents and votes to affirm in a separate opinion in which Judge Smith concurs in another separate dissenting opinion.
Order reversed, etc.