Would an Auto Bailout Lead to National Greatness?

There have been plenty of criticisms here of neoconservatism and "national greatness conservatism," but two of the occasional targets, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks, have just published devastating critiques of the auto industry bailout. Here's Krauthammer in the Washington Post:

First, the arbitrariness. Where do you stop? Once you've gone beyond the financial sector, every struggling industry will make a claim on the federal treasury. What are the grounds for saying yes or no?

The criteria will inevitably be arbitrary and political. The money will flow preferentially to industries with lines to Capitol Hill and the White House. To the companies heavily concentrated in the districts of committee chairmen. To clout. Is this not precisely the kind of lobby-driven policymaking that Obama ran against?

Second is the sheer inefficiency. Saving Detroit means saving it from bankruptcy. As we have seen with the airlines, bankruptcy can allow operations to continue while helping to shed fatally unsupportable obligations. For Detroit, this means release from ruinous wage deals with their astronomical benefits (the hourly cost of a Big Three worker: $73; of an American worker for Toyota: $48), massive pension obligations and unworkable work rules such as "job banks," a euphemism for paying vast numbers of employees not to work.

The point of the Democratic bailout is to protect the unions by preventing this kind of restructuring. Which will guarantee the continued failure of these companies, but now they will burn tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. It's the ultimate in lemon socialism.

Democrats are suggesting, however, an even more ambitious reason to nationalize. Once the government owns Detroit, it can remake it. The euphemism here is "retool" Detroit to make cars for the coming green economy.

Liberals have always wanted the auto companies to produce the kind of cars they insist everyone should drive: small, light, green and cute. Now they will have the power to do it.

And David Brooks in the New York Times:

This is a different sort of endeavor than the $750 billion bailout of Wall Street. That money was used to save the financial system itself. It was used to save the capital markets on which the process of creative destruction depends.

Granting immortality to Detroit’s Big Three does not enhance creative destruction. It retards it. It crosses a line, a bright line. It is not about saving a system; there will still be cars made and sold in America. It is about saving politically powerful corporations. A Detroit bailout would set a precedent for every single politically connected corporation in America. There already is a long line of lobbyists bidding for federal money. If Detroit gets money, then everyone would have a case. After all, are the employees of Circuit City or the newspaper industry inferior to the employees of Chrysler?

It is all a reminder that the biggest threat to a healthy economy is not the socialists of campaign lore. It’s C.E.O.’s. It’s politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state.

Hear, hear. The intellectual case for the bailout--if there was one--surely can't survive these two clear and analytical critiques in the nation's most influential newspapers. But then, protectionism couldn't survive the analytical critique of Adam Smith in 1776, and yet it persists. So we can't assume that members of Congress will read Brooks and Krauthammer and sheepishly drop the idea of handing a big pile of taxpayers' money to corporate managers, stockholders, and unions who have dug themselves into a deep hole.

Krauthammer and Brooks both make a careful distinction between the financial bailout and the proposed auto industry bailout. Krauthammer posits the Wall Street intervention as "an emergency measure to save the financial sector on the grounds that finance is a utility. No government would let the electric companies go under and leave the country without power. By the same token, government must save the financial sector lest credit dry up and strangle the rest of the economy." But bailing out Detroit is put forth as a scheme to save jobs, and where does that process stop? Krauthammer warns that the "drift toward massive industrial policy threatens to grow into the guaranteed inefficiencies of command-economy maximalism."

For those of us who opposed all the taxpayer bailouts, starting back with Bear Stearns―or with Chrysler in 1979―all these bad ideas may seem to run together. Bear Stearns, AIG, the general financial industry, the auto industry―it's all government intervening with taxpayers' money to favor some businesses or industries that made mistakes. Perhaps because they weren't so critical of the measures to deal with the financial crisis, Krauthammer and Brooks find it easier to see what's very different about the Detroit bailout. And they both make crucial points: the dangers of political allocation of resources, the benefits of bankruptcy and restructuring, the industry's partially self-inflicted wounds, the desire of some Democrats for political power over corporate decisionmaking, the dangers of corporate capitalism. Let's hope members of Congress read and underline both columns.