Fools & Idiots

Some people think that the words "fool" and "idiot" are synonyms; they might be listed as such by the thesaurus, I don't know, but according to myself they are not. A fool, you see, is a truly stupid person. A fool tries to do the right thing but always winds up doing the wrong thing. I made a birdhouse one time and it looked like a model of a rundown shack in the Appalachians; I didn't try to make it that way so I guess that makes me a fool as far as craftsmanship is concerned. A fool is also the kid who tries to get the right answer but gets it wrong but still deserves a B for trying; thankfully I'm smart enough that I've never really been in that position. An idiot, however, is a different breed.

Idiots are people like the CEOs of Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. Here you have a bunch of guys who have been paid millions of dollars in order to make profits for these companies, which is the exact opposite of what they have done. Now these men are on Capitol Hill begging for money to bail themselves out of a rut, money nobody thinks they deserve but that everybody knows they need in order to prevent excessive unemployment. Another group of idiots are the government officials who were eager to give a giant bailout to the financial industry with virtually no strings attached while now asking the auto industry to jump through hoops of fire in order to get a loan a fraction of the size. It isn't that they're wrong for making the auto industry jump through hoops; it's just that they're making them do it in light of the financial mess. Of course when it comes to it one bailout helped mostly rich guys and the other benefits mainly workers, I think that fact tells you all you need to know. Another idiot I can point to is George W. Bush; I think you know what I am talking about when I say "idiot."

An idiot, for those of you too idiotic to figure it out by now, is a person who does the sorts of things fools would do all while knowing that their actions are foolish (yet they do not stop). I think that this whole auto industry shindig kind of illustrates idiocy better than any example in modern history save maybe Three Mile Island. As much as I'm a libertarian and as much as I hate to say it, the entire economy can't stand if the auto industry falls and as a result they must be bailed out. The thing that allows me to be smug in the end in spite of the fact that my principles must be violated in the short term is the fact that this would have never happened had my principles been followed in the long term. To put it blankly, if it were not for all the protectionism of the past the auto industry would have been forced to compete and thus would not be in the situation it is today. Protectionism is where the idiocy comes in.

Now, if anybody recalls the height of auto industry protectionism came during the 1980s, under our great "free market" leader, Ronald Reagan. It had been before this and it continued somewhat after that, but the bottom line is that the auto industry and autoworkers have done nothing but gripe about them dang Orientals and their dang compact cars that people actually want. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this xenophobic attitude did nothing but delay the inevitable. Thanks to the short term protectionism of our government and thanks to the fact that the auto industry, ranging from CEOS to the assembly workers themselves, did not want to compete and preferred to complain about foreign cars coming in. Now we're officially screwed. The idiot part of this all is that only an idiot would have allowed this sort of thing to continue, that is, our Yale and Harvard educated elites obviously saw the crap coming down the tube and obviously did nothing to encourage competition. This could have easily been done by embracing free trade rather than xenophobic protectionism way back in the 1980s, but unfortunately Ronald Reagan was too much of a hypocrite to let the free market take effect then and now we simply can't afford it to take affect now when it's too late.

Now for those of you who are students of history, can anybody tell me how America became dominant in manufacturing in the first place? The answer is because Germany and Japan were bombed into submission during WWII (along with much of Europe and the Soviet Union) and other areas had no industry to begin with. I'm not suggesting at all that we targeted German and Japanese industry in order to gain a competitive edge, but it certainly gave it to us. Then we got protectionism and because we protected a few jobs in the short term we got screwed in the long term once the world began building factories and actually making things. It was all idiocy, no doubt. Perhaps the only thing we can be thankful for at this point is that no politician will allow 10% unemployment on his hands thanks to fear of retaliation at the polls. The truth is that most of the politicians opposing bailing out the auto industry hope that they can keep opposing the bailout all while it passes thanks to other people, that way they can claim to have kept their principles and saved the taxpayer all while not having to deal with the consequences of high unemployment. Ain't brute self-interest grand?