Auto Industry Bailout and the American Economy

Anecdotes are just as unreliable as hard statistics, but I have arrived at a 'place' in my perceived reality that I can only truly rely (and then extrapolate) upon evidence that I can reliably measure myself. I have two automobiles in my garage; a 1949 Ford Custom Fordor (yes, that's how it's spelled) sedan and 1997 Ford Crown Victoria sedan (all Crown Vics have four doors now). Both are in very good condition, the '97 having over 210,000 miles and the '49 having more miles that odometers have digits. Both are V-8, rear-wheel drive cars, both have 3-speed transmissions with overdrive, though the '49, admittedly, is manual shift. The '97 gets about 26mpg, hwy, and the '49 delivers about 21 mpg. I would take either car on a cross-country trip today. Certainly the later model automobile is more comfortable, with it's air conditioning, quiet door seals and adjustable power seats, but it does lack a certain je ne sais quoi, when compared to the 'novelty' of operating a sixty-year-old vehicle. What I fail to see is fifty years of useful technological improvement between the two cars. I might add that the '49 cost about $1600 new, while the '97 went for somewhere around $22,000. Today the elder is worth about $5000 and the younger, perhaps $3000.

I use the above to illustrate the argument that the American auto industry has been building durable, functional cars for over half a century (although they did take a bit of a quality break in the mid 70's). The fact is that we don't need to build six million new cars each year, and we cannot, or should not, sustain an industry that plans to maintain anywhere near that kind of capacity. Note that we only make about four million American people per year (and I am NOT making an argument for more human production either). Certainly, the auto industry must support spare parts, r & d, safety and reliability testing, etc., but need it be on this scale? Many proponents of a government bailout for the auto industry argue that the Big Three need more money as they are moving to a leaner philosophy, and it sounds about as logical a dieter asking for a bigger buffet in order to lose weight.

Economic equilibrium means supply meets demand. There is no judgment about the level of said demand in traditional economic study. A pig at the trough simply demands more slop, and that's okee-dokee. Someone with our leadership's ear must start to argue for some viable equilibrium in the auto industry, and in the economy at large. The notoriously-American idea of more-is-better can only be maintained as long as we make more people, use more resources, print more money, pave more roads,...I could go on and on. Capitalism cannot survive in a vacuum. The concept of an ever-growing GNP is so dogmatic in our radical capitalist religion that anything else is some kind of economic problem. America has a pornography-styled addiction to MORE. We've gone past need, past greed, and so far into luxury that we no longer recognize it and it no longer pleases us. This is the logic of a virus which eventually kills its formerly healthy host and moves on to the next. Thus far our 'hosts' have been well-resourced, underdeveloped nations, and we're running out of them. We have converted China and India to our religion, and when they start practicing at the fundamentalist high-priest level of the U.S., we will notice far too late that our 'host' is the earth itself.

Perhaps we should redirect our automobile money toward the space program...