Auto industry success?

Obama says let us have more bailouts

GM costs taxpayers $25 billion

Sometimes I think one has to be seriously delusional to be a politician, or otherwise how can they believe what they say?

President Obama told a political rally that he wants to repeat the success of the auto industry bailouts of three years ago with other industries. Is he kidding?

First of all, I fail to see how the “bailouts” or “rescues” to use the more politically correct term were a success. Oh, yes, GM and Chrysler still exists, sans more than a few nameplates and dealerships. Both ended up in bankruptcy court and apparently GM is threatening to return to bankruptcy court. Now, if that is what is termed a success, I hate to see what would be termed a failure.

Second, the federal government really doesn’t have any business owning large consumer product companies … and that is what car companies are: Consumer product companies. I can see a case for the government owning businesses that provide government with products, although that often can be done just as effectively and cheaply by private agents, but I don’t see that large enough demand for cars for the government to be building cars for itself … tanks, maybe; cars, no.

Third, I really don’t like seeing the federal government circumventing the law to favor one group or another or one industry over another. Yes, watching companies go belly up for any reason is not pretty and it hurts … humans get hurt really bad sometime. However, that is part of life and it seems it is a part of life that, for some crazy reason, a whole bunch of people seem to think that we can avoid. Speaking from personal experience: WRONG ANSWER!

I have made any number of lousy stinking decisions in my life, and I have paid a price for most of them. Very few of those times was that price something I enjoyed. No, and some of them hurt like the dickens but I learned I had to endure them.

Yet, it seems that somewhere along the line, we in this country have come to the idea that we don’t have to pay a price for our bad decisions. We have decided that we are not responsible for the things that go wrong and they always are the fault of someone else. Our president seems particularly adept at making that claim, much to my dismay.

You know, sometimes tsunamis happen. It isn’t your fault, but you get swept away all the same. Well, over the last four or five years, there have been a number of economic tsunamis that have swept across the landscape of the U.S. and the world and every one of them probably could have possibly been avoided if we lived in a perfect world. But, you know what? We don’t.

But instead of doing what we should have done, which was try to cope and then rebuild from the creative destruction and chaos that resulted, we tried to soften the impact by not letting the Wall Street financiers and the corporate giants and big banks take it on the chin and let the market sort itself out. That was a huge mistake and I thought so at the time, and I still think so.

It all sounds well and good that our government is riding to our rescue … but you know something, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.