I think the point is that if it's his money he's pissing away, then any other projects the money would have been spent on would have been equally dubious in any

I think the point is that if it's his money he's pissing away, then any other projects the money would have been spent on would have been equally dubious in any case. He's not going to, all of a sudden, become wise simply because he doesn't spend money on what he's spending money on. Did we give him wayyy too much free money via subsidies? Yes. But that was our mistake. And if we hadn't given it to him, we would have given it to some other scam artists somewhere or other. So even in the case of the counterfactual, we could expect a similar outcome. Just different scumbags.