Tennessee's own Marsh Blackburn had the best soundbite:The proposed rescue plan "won't revive America's auto industry," Cooper said in a statement. "It only delays the pain and rewards bad management."
"I cannot recall the last time you saw the federal government (successfully) micromanage an industry," Blackburn said. "Not every solution needs to come out of Washington."
I may have to leave my libertarian card at the door for suggesting this, but...
ReplyDeleteI have heard many times over the past how government must give taxpayer money to company X because X is "too big to fail".
I would submit that a company that is "too big to fail" is too big to allow to exist in the first place.
If our government cannot be bothered to let the invisible hand do its work by letting bad companies fail, couldn't it be more pre-emptive in breaking up companies with a potential stranglehold on our economic jugular vein?
The fiction (at least, I assume it's a fiction) that the Big 3 are "too big to fail" seems to cast them as a quasi-monopoly. The defining characteristics of a monopoly are that it has no close substitutes, and that it is a price maker.
If you view the Big 3 as a single buyer when it comes to "employment", you could view their bail-out demands as the price they are demanding from "the market" because the Big 3 know there is no close substitute for their "product".
Or maybe I should stop playing amateur economist and get back to work. :-)