It seems to be OK, according to the Dubya Administration, to give literal billions of dollars to financial institutions to keep them from total collapse, but not to give even 1/30 of that amount to help keep our troubled auto manufacturing industry from going under. What's wrong with this picture?
(1) The finance industry is white collar, generally conservative, and mostly GOP supporters--and not unionized, to boot. Besides, it's where the vast majority of the people in power have made their own fortunes. So they are in a real way protecting themselves and their own livelihoods.
(2) The auto industry has lots and lots of unionized blue-collar workers. Forcing it to go under will break the unions and thus help maintain the financial supremacy and security of those who already have the most money. The rich get richer, the rest of us get screwed . . .
(3) However: the fallout from the crash of the auto manufacturing industry will directly hurt a lot more people than would the crash of just some of our financial institutions. The auto industry crash fallout will ripple through the whole country, hurting car dealerships, automotive insurance providers, parts suppliers and retailers, body shops and mechanics, gasoline retailers, and even junk yards . . . not to mention consumers. But the fallout from the financial crash, while hurting many people on paper, has yet to directly affect everyone in the country--if for no other reason than that not all the banks crashed. The ones that survived are buying up the others' assets at fire sale prices. They'll be stronger in the end. If all three of the Big Three go down for good, however, we as a country will wind up even further in debt than we are now to other countries. Not a good way to maintain independence.
And yet there are those who insist the problem is that we don't "buy American." Well . . . even such American icons as the Mustang and the Corvette are not made 100% of US made parts these days. Besides, encouraging us to "buy American" is [in a very real way--Ed.] a total contradiction of the encouragers' stated preference for a truly "free market."
If we are to be the best possible consumers and are to make the "free market" work properly, we are supposed to buy the best products at the best prices. If that means buying a Honda instead of a Lincoln, so be it. Lincoln will either have to improve or go out of business. That's what a "free market" does.
If we are to look our for our own non-economic interests first, on the other hand, we should always "buy American" when we can. [Note: Defense spending is a special case. National security compels me to say that we must always "buy American" when it comes to things like military aircraft. Otherwise, some of America's enemies would find it much too easy to gain information about our security measures and abilities--thus the ways to beat them--that we really don't want made widely known.--Ed.]
I'm not keen on throwing good money after bad. Nonetheless, I think failing to help our American automakers is going to hurt more of us, and to a deeper degree in the long run, than will giving the banks a little less of the government's largesse. Besides, we can always put terms on the money we lend to the automakers that will help them (1) modernize their production facilities to let them produce alternative fuel cars sooner than they could otherwise; (2) limit the amounts of executive salaries and bonuses to a reasonable amount; (3) get some reasonable concessions from the unions--I don't know anyone who'd be so stupid as to say "no job with no benefits" is preferable to "a decent job with lesser benefits"--at least until the USS Economy gets herself re-righted. For that matter, we should have put similar (but appropriate to the industry) terms on the money we've already given and are yet to give to the banks.
The way things stand, however, I am forced to conclude that the only reason the financial industry is "worth" the 700 billion dollar bailout but the Big Three automakers are not "worth" 1/30 that amount is that the relatively few at the very tippy-top of the economic food chain as always want to protect themselves. If that's to the detriment of the rest of the country, so be it. Well, isn't that attitude why we "threw the bums" out in the just-completed elections? So let's work to get something going that will help the rest of us first, for a change!
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