Set aside for the moment the constitutional argument. There’s a practical reason why Washington politicians and bureaucrats have no business managing General Motors and Chrysler: They’re no good at it.
Exhibit A is what Washington has done to Detroit in little more than a year since the bailouts of 2009. An audit by Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, found that President Obama’s auto task force arbitrarily closed many profitable dealerships, destroying thousands of jobs “based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decision’s broader economic impact.” Barofsky observed that Chrysler and GM were subsequently forced to reinstate more than 700 of the approximately 3,000 disenfranchised dealers, “suggesting, at the very least, that the number and speed of the terminations was not necessarily critical to the manufacturers’ viability.”
