"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
news
On Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:31:19 -0400, the infamous Joseph Gwinn
scrawled the following:

Holman Jenkins on what caused the rust in the capitol of the Rust Belt.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122463178413656455.html

Congress: The icking fudiots we love to hate.

What makes you think he's right?

He has a narrow and jaundiced view of the Wagner Act (we give a right for
individual investors to organize into limited-liability corporations and to
bargain with employees -- why not give the same right to employees? Adam
Smith's idea of capitalism, which is what we supposedly adhere to today,
said explicitly that it depends upon a balance of bargaining power).

He talks about how European divisions of US carmakers produce "desirable,
fuel-efficient cars," without mentioning either that labor has FAR more
power in Europe, or that the cars are the result of a market skewed by
government toward taxing fuel many times more than it's taxed in the US, and
decades of taxing car owners annually based on the engine displacement of
their cars. 'Sure sounds like legislative meddling to me. Why did Jenkins
skip over that crucial fact?

He complains that the fuel-efficiency standards written in the 1970s
"penalized" car makers who didn't make their fuel-efficient cars in the US.
Duh...what is Jenkins suggesting? That the US should encourage car makers to
make all of their "desirable, fuel-efficient" cars overseas? Did he not note
that "desirable, fuel-efficient" cars, if they're so desirable, would be
EXACTLY what the US builders were making if they actually were following
market demands? If they're so desirable, why aren't they what the car makers
are building here?

The whole piece is a combination of apologies for the planning and
strategies of US car company executives, flavored with a contradictory
mixture of conservative ideologies. It appears that US builders did NOT
follow the market, if those European cars are so "desirable" here. And those
desirable European cars were a response NOT to free markets, but rather to
some of the most skewed, over-legislated, over-taxed government intrusions
anywhere in the industrialized world.

You can dismiss Jenkins as a lightweight thinker and an ideologue with
blinders on. Next argument?

--
Ed Huntress