GM Bailout

I have a serious, simple question to ask:

Why are we even considering bailing out American automakers? Why are people like Freddie so vociferous in their support of handing out billions of dollars to GM and the rest?

I’m honestly quite confused. It doesn’t really make much sense to me. Their arguments appear to come down to this: Well, we bailed out Wall Street! It’s not fair to let companies that employ middle class people to go under! The unions have tried to make concessions, so they can’t possibly be the reason that American autos are uncompetitive in the market place!

I’ll let others argue the difference between allowing Wall Street to collapse and forcing the car companies to reorg under Chapter 11 (it seems to me that it’s the difference between a global depression and forcing Americans to buy better, cheaper, more fuel efficient foreign cars, but I digress). And I don’t really have a dog in the pro/anti union struggle; I think they’ve probably done more good than bad, but they’re certainly a major reason that Detroit is in such terrible shape today. (Whenever I think about unions, I’m always reminded of the Simpsons episode where a young Monty Burns encounters a pro-union worker at his grandfather’s plant who screeches “You can’t treat the working man this way. One day, we’ll form a union and get the fair and equitable treatment we deserve! Then we’ll go too far, and get corrupt and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive!”)

I’m just asking, from a common sense perspective: what do we have to gain by keeping the bloated corpses of GM, Chrysler, and Ford alive? They’ve lost market share for something like two straight decades. They make inferior, inefficient cars that are extremely expensive to produce. They haven’t responded to market place demands. Why are we bound and determined to keep them from declaring bankruptcy?