President Bush pledged to give GM and Chrysler almost $18 billion in taxpayer money, because they are too big to fail.
The federal government will help Detroit’s ailing automakers survive at least another few months by offering $17.4 billion in rescue loans in exchange for concessions from carmakers and their workers.
The government will have the option of becoming a stockholder in the companies, much as it has with major banks, in effect partially nationalizing the industry.
Nationalizing the auto industry. Nationalizing the banking industry. Nationalizing, nationalizing, nationalizing.
This is the kind of stuff Chavez does, but under the guise of fairness to the people. This is a terrible road to go down, but no one is standing on the Captiol steps screaming, “STOP! This is America! We are capitalists! This is socialism! We can’t do this!”
The government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem. It helped create this mess, and damn near every mess they are trying to clean up right now. You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. You can’t solve it by throwing more and more money at it.
You only subsidize failure.
Jimmie at the Sundries Shack say this is more than a transfer of wealth. He says it’s a transfer of pain:
The only reason that the President authorized those loans is to avoid the “pain” that GM and Chrysler’s employees might feel from layoffs and work slowdowns. Unfortunately, pain is a fact of life and no amount of government padding makes it go away. It just transfers that pain to other people – namely you and me.
Conservatives understand that. We don’t like it, but we’re not so foolish as to believe that we can make things better by sending one person’s pain to someone else we believe in our arrogance should bear it.
Pain transferred is not pain averted. It’ll wait and magnify until more people feel the pain that only a few needed to feel in the first place. The fallacy of government tinkering with the economy is that all that ever results from such tinkering is that a a minor hurt today becomes a major one tomorrow.
And then there is Fred Thompson:
We are taking more steps across the bridge to dependence. If this is what the Republicans have to offer, and they are the party of limited government, we are lost.
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