As Yvonne wrote the other day, we can return to our wonderful lives now, and find that they are, indeed, wonderful. We all get a prize for surviving — what? the Dubya years, all eight of ’em? How about the last forty, ever since Tricky Dick’s success with the “Southern Strategy“? With all due respect to Messrs Carter and Clinton, it is great to have a Democrat from the North in the offing.

In the middle of what was for the most part a crisp and lovely Sunday — autumn with the scent of winter, always refreshing ahead of time — I spent a fair amount of time arguing about what to do about “Detroit.” Here’s the vulgar wisdom: now that we’ve “bailed out” the bankers, let’s “bail out” the Big Three. In fact, the auto makers have a much greater claim on our generosity, because they employ millions of workers.

It’s as if the Soviet bloc’s command economy never existed. Red-blooded Americans advocate keeping a hopelessly moribund industry alive for the sake of payroll: the Trabant option.

I say: pension off the workers, no matter what it costs; I leave the details to policy wonks. Call it a one-time-only fix, a shame-on-you-America for having treated automobiles like sexual surrogates for sixty years. You can be sure of one thing, though: every red cent of the handout will recirculate in the retail economy, benefiting butchers, bakers, and  candlestick-makers. Not a dime will go into Swiss banking accounts — nor will more than a million or two, probably, find its way into whatever takes the place of hedge funds.

A propos of these draconian ideas, I suggest traveling back in time, all the way to 2003. That’s when I wrote (from what I can tell) a page at Portico about what already seemed to be the shaky future of GM et al. I was considering a book by an eminent reporter who is still on the automotive beat, Micheline Maynard. What still amazes me is that Ms Maynard’s account of auto-making in America at the Millennium could be so richly detailed where foreign concerns, especially Honda, were concerned, and yet so opaque about “Detroit.” It was as though, aside from marketers, the town were run by robots. While foreign manufacturers made cars, Detroit was into 4×4 vibrators. This link will take you straight to the beginning of the discussion, which follows a look at the Enron mess. Yes: that long ago!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 11:42 pm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.