The Auto Industry Makes Me Miss Being a Cocksure College Student

The auto bailout thing has really been giving me agita.

It wouldn't have 10 years ago. 10 years ago, I graduated from college, and one of my final courses was an honors course I got into via a computer accident on the Intellectual History of Liberal Thought taught by one of the nation's most respected professors. This was a class I did not need to graduate -- something I thought about regularly as I attempted to digest as much as possible the two entire books per week that the syllabus demanded of my time. Yet in the end, it was one of the most rewarding of my life.

Coming out of that class, having read F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and Ludwig von Mises's Liberalism, and Wilhelm von Humboldt's The Limits of State Action, and the bloated but undeniably influential Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, I came out of college so cocksure of myself and what I stood for. On top of all this reading, my father, a small business owner and deep rooted capitalist, further instilled in me a sense of the vital nature of the free market and the evils of government influence and control. (It is important to note that he also fully recognized the benefits of tight government regulation in his own industry, as playing by the rules gave him a significant marketing edge over his competitors. I wish I had recordings of his brilliant over-the-phone conversations where he would weave a memorizing tale of how his business did everything by-the-book.)

If the me of 1998 was faced with the questions of bailing out the auto industry in 2008, 1998-Jason would have said with clarity and conviction, "NO! Government interference in this matter is anathema to a free market system. Free markets mean that sometimes you fail. Thems the breaks." And to anyone who might be hurt by the Big 3 going down or lose their job, I would say, to paraphrase Steve Buscemi in Reservoir Dogs, "Learn to fucking program a computer."

There are times I miss being so damn sure of myself. Even as an atheist, I understand the appeal of having a central text to guide your moral thinking, and given that The Bible had found no purchase in my life, Atlas Shrugged served as that moral text for me for a number of my twentysomething years.

Over the years, however, I've become more and more of a pure liberal. This is no doubt a partial response to spending the ages of 24 through 33 living under the most anti-rational, anti-reason, anti-mind, anti-science Presidential administration in U.S. history (so I suppose I must give some credit to Rand for instilling in me a vital sense of the important of rational thought in my life), but over time I've reconsidered the role of government in society. For years now, I've been realizing that capitalism starts to break down when the Randian heroes and leaders of industry and finance start to get greedy beyond all comprehension. I have started to believe that some form of regulation and control must be put into place as a check and balance to this greed.

But I digress. The real question is, what does the 2008-Jason have to say about bailing out the auto industry? What do we do when the plane -- or in this case the oversized gas-guzzling SUV -- has crashed into the mountain?

I'm seriously torn. The bleeding heart liberal hippie in me sees the hard working Midwesterners who didn't have the same privileges as I did to go to college and have worked in the auto factories their whole lives and just want to put food on the table and give their kids a better life, and as far as that part of me is concerned, the government can give them a trillion dollars for all I care.

Then there's my analytical side, which thinks that while there will be serious struggles in the interim, letting the Big 3 go bankrupt could be the best thing for the long term. These companies would likely break down into smaller companies that would be far more adaptive and responsive to a changing economic and cultural environment. Toyota and Honda would likely sweep in further expanding their production in the United States, and I think that would be a good thing (I don't hold fast to the "Buy American" attitude -- buying a "foreign" car still puts the bread on plenty of American tables, and I accepted over a decade ago that we live in a world economy). I actually advocated a similar short-term-distress-long-term-benefits outcome for our local economy should United ever dump Denver as it's primary hub.

Besides, there's a part of me that thinks these stupid, greedy, corporate cocksuckers really deserve to go down on a sinking ship. Look, I don't give a crap that they flew to their first meeting with Congress in a private jet (or that they drove to their second meeting in a hybrid). I care that they missed the BIG writing on the wall that the market and the world was going to demand smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. This is beyond just being greedy -- because if their goal was just to make as much money as possible, they would have been very focused on making cars people actually wanted. These people were also just lazy. America used to innovate and inspire. These guys just sat on a pile of cash and presumed it would just grow and grow. So let them falter.

Michael Moore presented a very interesting idea earlier this week. (Here's the video version of the idea for those of you who aren't a fan of reading.) Basically, he suggests that the government just buys these companies (the common shares of GM are worth about $3 billion) and directs them to make super fuel-efficient cars and trains and lightrail and buses. When they get back on their feet, the government returns the companies to private ownership.

Do I agree with this plan? Well... the free market 1998 Jason still cringes a bit at this idea. But we live in a world with unprecedented challenges, and I recognize we're going to need unprecedented solutions. And as Moore points out, this solution actually isn't all that unprecedented -- FDR basically did the same thing. I will say this -- if there is one fundamental purpose I see in government, it's that government should do the things that are so big no one else can do, and this is one big mess we're in right now. I like Moore's plan a LOT more than I like the notion of a bridge loan, which has about as much good sense as giving a coke fiend with a bad sports betting habit a few grand "just to get by."

If I had to rank what I think should be done, I'd probably vote for Moore's plan first as radical as it may be, letting the Big 3 go bankrupt and see what rises from the ashes second, and giving them a bridge loan third.

Guess which one is actually going to happen?