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What a steamin pile of...how can expect American workers to compete with third world wages....? Can you afford to work for two bucks and hour, have no health insurance and no retirement? Even if you are willing to work for two buck per hour, your government won't allow it...we have laws to protect workers here. Perhaps, they should be abolished as well. Japan protects its auto industry and Koreans subsidizes Kia and people work for extremely low wages. You are asking for the moon...Ameicans workers can not compete with low cost workers from socialist countries-unions have nothing to do with this. You know I guess GM(along with steel, garment, It etc) will get 'what they deserve' and I guess people like you living in a post manufacturing US will get what you deserve also..GM workers will lose their jobs, but so will many other workers who depend upon the success of GM. It's a domino effect and all Americans will eventually be knocked out. I guess we better visit third world countries so we can figure out exactly what we 'deserve'.

GM workers will lose their jobs, but so will many other workers who depend upon the success of GM.

My father and one of my uncles worked for major steel companies in the US from the early nineteen hundreds to the mid fifties. They saw the need for reform in the labor practices and the role unions had in helping the workers. Later they saw the decline and fall of the steel industry in this country because of the excesses of the labor unions and the politicians anxious to get union votes. Our steel industry went overseas fifty years ago. People lost jobs and companies went out of business. GM and to some extent the other auto manufacturers are just a continuation of the same problem.

American workers should compete with third world workers on the basis of productivity and quality. If the American worker cannot generate a value commiserate with their pay then they do not earn what they are paid. The difference in wages should be purely a function of the difference in productivity and quality, if the third world worker can deliver the same quality and productivity then they wages should be equal. The American worker should only earn twenty times the wage if a third world worker if they can be twenty times as productive.

Industry protection and subsidization are only tools for taking away the economic freedoms of their citizens. Government subsidization of the automotive industry means either I am being forced to pay for a product I would otherwise not by (via my tax dollars) or I am paying more for the product after the bureaucratic middlemen get their cut. The US should not subsidize any industry, we should cut taxes on all equally, reduce the regulatory burdens and stop businesses from having to play tort court roulette.

When a company like GM collapses it will make for some difficult times for a segment of the economy, but that is the cost of creative destruction. Those people will find new employment that will benefit the economy far more than working for GM would and most of them will be better for it too. A far worse fate for the US is that a broken, inefficient company like GM continue limping on, bleeding productivity and using up resources for years and years, while costing consumers and tax payers billions. Your mindset would lead us to prop up failing industries everywhere until we are like the French and the Germans or the former USSR- ossified and dying.

China, for all its cheap labor is incredibly inefficient because unemployment is so intolerable to the communist system they continue to employ much of their workforce to produce junk there is little or no market for. The market is deciding that is does not want the junk GM produces and you are proposing we follow the Chinese model. I say we should be good capitalists, let it die and the resources they are using will be put to more valuable purposes.