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Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle wants to recover $10 million that taxpayers donated to General Motors.

Good luck.

The $10 million welfare check was designed to keep GM from closing its automotive plant in Janesville, a strategy that fell apart when GM announced last week it was closing the Janesville facility and three others. Which raises the question: Why should businesses receive taxpayer handouts?

For all the dominant political discourse about the infallibility of an unfettered free market and sheer evil of government intervention in the economy, business still get its hands on lots of taxpayer money. If the unregulated free market does indeed produce optimum results, then why are state and local governments compelled to write checks to private enterprises, pay their infrastructure costs or award them tax credits that aren’t available to the public at large?

These subsidies don’t determine whether economic activity will take place; they just determine where economic activity will take place. Rather than expand the economy or make economic activity more efficient, taxpayer handouts simply enrich the recipients of the subsidy.

There is a way out of this mess: economic non-aggression pacts. Businesses ruthlessly play states off other states and localities off other localities. Too often, businesses will threaten to relocate, grab the subsidy, and then relocate anyway. It could stop if states and localities were to simply agree not to offer subsidies or tax incentives that aren’t available to the public generally. If nations can agree to eliminate unfair subsidies through international trade agreements, then units of government within the United States can make those agreements too.

It’s one thing to distort the market in a way that benefits the poor, disabled and vulnerable. It’s quite another to distort the market in a way that exacerbates an already growing income disparity between the richest Americans and everyone else. GM took $10 million of Wisconsin tax dollars, and now Wisconsin taxpayers have nothing to show for it. That’s not the free market. That’s corporate welfare.