As long as government remains in the position to attempt to pick winners and losers in the free market, they can apparently claim a 50% success rate. They don’t score too well in the category of picking winners (see Solyndra, etc.) but they do a bang up job in picking losers. As Seton Motley informs us, GM is racking up all sorts of awards this year.

General Motors stock (NYSE: GM) finished 2011 down 46.1% – the absolute worst car or car-related product stock on the board. Besting (so to speak) the second worst by 4.5%.

And GM’s unprofitable, unpopular, combustible electric Chevy Volt was a ‘Worst Product Flop of 2011’ winner. Oh, and GM is moving electric vehicle development (and production?) to China – which sort of undermines the jobs “created or saved” reason for the $50 billion GM bailout.

All of which is even more terrible GM news for We the Taxpayers…

Less Government President Seton Motley:

“From the moment the bailouts began – and General Motors became Government Motors – we have seen GM stack failure upon failure.

“There’s the unprofitable, unpopular, combustible electric Chevy Volt – a ‘Worst Product Flop of 2011’ winner. That costs We the Taxpayers $250,000 per unit sold. GM sold in 2011 25% fewer Volts than they had planned – but is in 2012 bizarrely increasing production by 500%. And despite all of this failure – including the inability to determine what is causing Volts to burst into flames – GM will next year begin producing an electric Cadillac and an electric Cruze.

“GM in 2010 received more clean (non-energy) energy patents than any other entity – of the Solyndra,Tesla, Fisker, uber-failure variety.

All of this is bad news for GM stockholders, of course. But before the Occupy movement gears up to say that fat cat investors probably had it coming, let’s remember that we were all investors in GM whether we wanted to be or not. The sad part is that some of the technologies under discussion actually do hold promise for the future, and I still believe that some, if not all of them will find their niche as time goes by. But in a free market economy such as ours, that type of evolutionary growth has to happen at its own organic pace and be palatable to the needs and reach of the nation. When Washington attempts to artificially force development in one direction or another – particularly when they clearly don’t understand all of the variables in the equation – the results are predictable. And GM has demonstrated this in an unfortunately clear fashion.