Social-engineering interventionism is one of the Democrats’ favorite things, and another is unions. Put those two together, and what you get is an ailing U.S. auto industry that is now pleading for a bailout it just maybe shouldn’t get.
It’s true that even without the United Auto Workers seriously handicapping the industry, or Congress tinkering where it shouldn’t have, the industry and in particular GM could be in a pickle. We have management at that company that has seemed to think of competition as a nuisance that would surely go away if ignored.
And then there’s a credit crunch making it tougher for people to buy cars, a drooping economy and gas prices that have not exactly inspired enthusiasm for some vehicles on the market.
You don’t have to travel far, though, to find analysts observing how UAW has made competition that much tougher because of unbending rules that for one thing have required more people to make a car than it takes to make one. Last year’s UAW’s strike against GM led to new agreements continuing the war against cost-cutting measures.
The UAW negatives go on and on until you start wondering why exactly the Democrats talked so much in this last election about restoring unionism to full bloom. To arrive at this economically ruinous state, they even advocated an unprincipled tactic: The elimination by law of secret ballots in union-forming votes by workers.
No doubt, the Democrats were wooing organized labor when they could have been looking at how well non-unionized workers are faring at a Kentucky Toyota plant that’s giving them profit-sharing bonuses while contributing mightily to the welfare of a state that has struggled economically.
Democrats along with Republicans have also happily hogtied our auto makers with fuel economy standards requiring in effect that they manufacture small cars that reportedly make scant money.
As is argued by the Competitive Enterprise Institute _ with backing from a study by the National Academy of Sciences and scholars at the Brookings Institution and Harvard _ these standards have not so secondarily killed thousands of Americans by pushing them into cars less safe than what they would have bought without the regulations.
It’s a cute leftist trick _ create a problem that you then blame on others even as you keep creating such problems. It was largely if not solely liberal enthusiasms for extending loans to bad credit risks that brought us to the current financial mess and the extraordinary, costly and constitutionally dubious gamble of a federal rescue of financial institutions. Should we just maybe leave the auto industry to fend for itself?
Congress, of course, already coughed up a $25 billion loan last September, and the loan now being sought could be that much or even twice as much again. GM is talking about bankruptcy if there is no help. Observers worry a consequence could be millions of job losses in related businesses.
But do bankruptcy and other difficulties of the moment have to mean total demise? What’s most needed, many agree, is a tough-minded reshaping of an industry that should get relief from excessive regulatory demands and rid itself in a fair, reasonable way of nonproductive union encumbrances. Some think that could happen without a bailout.
There’s obviously a lot at stake here, and more for legislators to learn and debate, but a bailout now does not assure there won’t be other requests later, or multiple bailout requests from still other industries until, finally, the idea of liberating, prosperity-producing free-market discipline will be a thing of the past, except maybe for a few mom-and-pop grocery stores.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected]
