The GM Bailout

So, General Motors will emerge from its government run bankruptcy soon.  It will issue an IPO and people will buy it and the government will get out - at some loss - and presumably GM will return to being a competent automaker now that it's free from some legacy costs, poor past management decisions and overwhelming debt.

Tens - if not hundreds of thousands of Americans will be able to keep their jobs because of this.

In an environment where official unemployment is around 9.5% and the number of non-job seekers and underemployed probably creeps close to 25%, this is an objectively and authoritatively good thing.

The Randian super-geniuses who genuflect before altars of Adam Smith that look suspiciously like mirrors rather than ikons were aghast at the government's involvement in the markets.  We were told that this was the death of capitalism/freedom/puppies/the Amurican Wayoflife.  This - crowed the Galtian crowd of "producers" - was socialism in its most blatant and this was how freedom dies.

Via bankruptcy restructuring?  That prevented the collapse of a major American industry?

Don't buy into the argument that Americans can no longer make things.  Ford has been doing great, because they happen to have had very good long range planning.  Ford is ahead of other American automakers in LEV and hybrid technology and they make a solid product.

Now, ironically, it was those "producers" that Ayn Rand fellated in her noxious tomes of narcissistic, arrested adolescence that screwed over GM.  It was the suits in the suites who thought doubling down on the Suburban and the Yukon were the way to go.

The engineers all along have been able to solve problems if given the mandate and resources to do so.  Remember, the suits in the suites argued against CAFE standards, seatbelts, airbags and catalytic converters. All of which have made the air cleaner and the roads safer.  All of which American auto executives said couldn't be done.  All of which foreign automakers did before us.

If GM really has turned a corner and can now make reliable, fuel efficient vehicles (in addition to their large market share of trucks), it will be because the government acted.

When Ronald Reagan uttered the sound bite: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" he unleashed a philosophy that effectively neutered the government from doing anything of consequence.  The droids that have assumed his mantle have taken as orthodoxy that government fails simply by being the government.

What that does is create a climate where government ceases to function.  Which reinforces the idea that government CAN'T function.

I think Obama's entire operating philosophy is to prove that government CAN act when required of it.  And therefore the GOP's plan of denying him ANY victories makes a sort of tactical sense.

But ultimately, we as  a nation suffer.  Just as we would have suffered if GM disappeared into oblivion, taking the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Americans with it.