The Exigent Duality
Nothing to see here, don't worry about it - 15:25 CST, 4/22/16 (Sniper)
How many cars would Tesla sell if the State wasn't handing out billions of dollars in tax breaks to the company, $7500 "tax credits" to each of the company's customers, plus god-knows-how-many government distortions going on behind the scenes with everything from the sourcing of materials to the production of batteries to favoritist laws?

Unfortunately, the world (market) will never know. The malinvestment is impossible to compute. But, you can get some kind of idea from the Wikipedia article (bold emphasis is mine):

"A Tesla branch existed in Singapore from July 2010 to February 2011, but the company ceased its operations in the country due to a lack of tax exemptions. Without tax breaks, the Roadster retailed between S$400,000 and S$500,000 rather than the much lower price of S$250,000."


So that puts the average "Model 3" price of $42k to $84k if you just eliminate the selective, corporate favoritist tax breaks. Given that 50% of Americans can't even afford an emergency $400 hospital bill, how many pre-orders do you think they'd have gotten on an $80k car versus a $40k car? From there you can start to wonder how many resources are being diverted away from better uses and towards the excess production of these cars, batteries, and so on, simply due to the tax cronyism.