Obama at the Auto Buffet (with no resistance, he ate the whole thing)

The Wall Street Journal ^ | May 20, 2009 | Holman W. Jenkins

[St. Louis Conservative]

With his latest installment of ever-higher fuel mileage requirements for the auto industry, Barack Obama embraces a momentary, crisis-spawned expansion of the art of the possible, unleavened by any art of the rationally desirable.

Detroit is dependent on Washington loans for survival. The industry's lobbyists and its congressional allies have collapsed in a heap, offering no resistance. So why not go for broke? If you're alone in front of the shrimp buffet, why not eat all the shrimp -- even if it makes you barf later?

Defenders of the Obama administration's Chrysler bankruptcy finagle misguidedly argue that, if not for taxpayer money, the company's secured creditors would have gotten as little or less than they did in the imposed settlement.

They miss the point. Anyone can always imagine an outcome more "fair" than the outcome provided by people duly exercising -- and the legal process duly upholding -- their rights. Fairness in a law-abiding society is due process. In the Chrysler bankruptcy, the administration hijacked the legal forms for a political end that it could have delivered honestly by the government buying Chrysler out of liquidation and handing it to the UAW.

But then Mr. Obama's purposes would have been exposed a little too nakedly for public consumption.

Already, of course, the swim of events has moved on, into deeper and more chaotic waters. The union will own 55% of Chrysler, and it would be quite rational to prefer an additional dollar of wages and benefits to 55 cents of earnings (55 cents being the union's share of a dollar of earnings).

Even this overstates the union's incentive to concern itself with the auto maker's profitability.

[dajeeps]

I hope he eventually ends up with the heartburn of his life.

[IrishMike]

From the article.....
‘Mr. Obama is creating a catastrophically unbalanced “system” with no effective pushback on behalf of profits (aka “viability”) — that is, except from consumers, who ultimately will doom his attempt. How so? By declining to pay enough for the forthcoming Obamamobiles to cover the cost of designing and building them’.