“LAST NIGHT I WENT TO SLEEP IN DETROIT CITY…”

11/14/08

The Big 3 automakers and their supporters in Congress are looking for their piece of the bailout mania that is currently consuming our nation’s capital. The Republicans, professing profound piety toward the gods of the free market, are refusing any sort of bailout for the Big 3.

I am the last person to argue that government ought to be in the business of bailing out private businesses. However, once the precedent has been set by spending billions (trillions, really) to bail out Wall Street, how can the government legitimately deny help to the Big 3? (I know that the Republicans, and especially the (Thank God!) outgoing Administration, are falling all over themselves saying that the Wall Street bailouts were against their principles but were absolutely necessary, that they had “no choice.” However, one should recognize such pious proclamations for what they are: futile attempts by meretricious politicians to cloak their solipsistic tendencies under a thin veneer of easily and conveniently disposed principle.)

Opponents of a Big 3 bailout argue that a collapse of Wall Street is fraught with “systemic risks” that hold ghastly consequences for our economy. Do they really believe that there are no “systemic risks” from a failure of the Big 3? Have these anodyne acolytes of what they have twisted free market principles into ever ventured out of New York or Washington? Have they ever been to the nation’s heartland? Parts suppliers, car dealers, car salesmen, steelmakers, advertisers, pro sports teams, even cattle ranchers and cotton farmers depend on the Big 3 for their prosperity, indeed, in some of the aforementioned cases, even their survival. Some opponents of the Big 3 bailout who had little problem with the Wall Street bailout argue that the Big 3 are mismanaged and that their workers make too much money. They make this argument with a straight face. Do they really believe that much of Wall Street and the banking industry were not mismanaged or that their workers do not make too much money?

As one of our more notorious presidents used to say, make no mistake. I am not for bailouts, but there is something perverse about bailing out Wall Street while giving the cold shoulder to the industrial base of our nation. The Republican refusal to bail out the Big 3 while harboring an enthusiasm for the bail out for Wall Street that was not well concealed by their ephemeral protests of having been dragged, kicking and screaming, into those bailouts is beginning to look like a manifestation of some sort of contempt for manufacturing. I don’t know whence this arises. Has their enthusiasm for a free markets and global competition somehow metamorphosized into a disdain for our side in that global competition or a failure to recognize that there indeed is an “our side” in the global marketplace? Or are some quarters of the Democratic Party right when they charge that the Republicans simply have no regard for people who work with their hands? The former is scary enough, the latter is downright chilling.