[fr_freak]

The head of GM deserved to be fired, it would be nicer if his idiot complacent shareholders fired him, but his largest creditor will do in a pinch. Who cares? A better conservative point would be that the UAW is the party that wrecked the industry, not that Obama is Hitler because he didn't let Wagonner stay and waste another $100 billion or so.

Sure the head of GM deserved to be fired. I doubt you'd find a person here who disagrees with that point. The fact that you don't understand why it is so disconcerting to people that the person who fired him was the President of the United States, or that the US government has a controlling interest in the company, demonstrates that you are blind to the implications of history. I would also say that you don't have a clue as to what constitutes American conservatism.

[JasonC]

I would venture to say I know as much about American conservatism as any man living. And being readily disconcerted isn't a sign of maturity or judgment. Of course I understand that lots of you are in denial about the state of the economy and how much corporate leaders have capitulated, that private markets simply refuse to allocate capital and voluntarily give that role to the government instead. I understand that this practical reality fails to fit your Reagan-era view of the world, to such an extent that you cannot wrap your minds around it and move on. But that isn't conservatism, it is just your own lack of imagination, understanding, and practical realism. It is, in fine, your ideological utopianism, which is emphatically not a conservative trait.

"But I want the private sector to decide" this that and the other. Sure. Well, here is what the private sector has decided - capital entrusted to the US treasury, 2%; capital entrusted to US banks, 12%. Capital entrusted to General Motors, 40% with no volume. The private market *refuses* to hand over allocation decisions to *other* private-market actors. But is entirely willing to let the US treasury do it.

Your approval of that fact, your bare recognition of that fact, is not required for it to be a fact. And the dominant, operative fact at this present moment in US economic affairs.

That being the case, the Federal Reserve and the US treasury are in charge of the survival and the success of capitalism. The private sector *gave it up* six months ago.

The Federal Reserve and the US treasury, yes even under Obama, desires the continued existence of capitalism. Capitalism will survive and in no great span of years it will once again prosper. That is its nature and its genius, that it can rise from the dead and adapt. But no, you cannot ensure that survival by insisting that it has already happened. It hasn't.

It is *normal* that the government support private industry and private finance in the smash. It has been that way since the 1600s, as long as there has been modern finance and modern capitalism. Your ideological utopias being too narrow in time, too limited in historical sense, too formulaic and not empirical enough about the messy practicalities of our true history, are *your* problem.

So no, screaming that socialism is upon us and all is doomed, when the Fed and treasury are in the act of saving capitalism from one of its periodic, self inflicted fits of madness, isn't going to win you anything. It isn't a true diagnosis of what is happening, it counsels all the wrong policies (because entirely unworkable), it refuses to face facts, and it is far too mired in a mere passing episode that will soon be forgotten by everyone other than the hyperventilators peddling right now.

The author is right. You need to *calm*. *Down*.