We’ll answer that question in a moment. But first, the answer to a different question: what has been our response to the current wave of bailouts?
That’s easy: “crap sandwich!” “Socialism!” And by way of Drudge: “Beggars on the hill!”
And one struggles with the question of how the conservative brand has become conflated with anti-intellectualism?
So with that in mind, how do you like this response?
Protecting an enterprise from its deep-seated inability to produce competitively and to engage with the future has never done anything but put off the inevitable, and very expensively. Toyota and Honda (or a competent new team with tough investors), will be happy to recycle the capital of GM into a working car company like their existing US operations. Or into scrap, as reality indicates. The workers need to be taken care of humanely, as their employer has not, trashing their retirement and medical insurance, but they don’t need to be made permanent charity cases, who pretend to create value in a government sheltered workhouse whose every day of operation is a mendacious pretense that the real losses haven’t already occurred. They have: US car companies misused and wasted the resources society entrusted them with and what’s left is a negative sum. The recovery will proceed much more successfully if we don’t start by lying to ourselves, never mind wasting money pounding the chests of corpses.
Not bad, right? The author is none other than Michael O’Hare. Yes, that Michael O’Hare, who by this measure presents conservative principles better than the conservatives do. If the conservatives hope to get footholds in 2010 and 2012, they’d best start working on 2008.
