To Save…What?

As Washington flirts with bailing out the auto industry, Ivan Osorio wonders what we’re saving, and ponders the downside of socializing the market:

As The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Ingrassia notes, Detroit doesn’t need more money, but radical change, including getting rid of union contracts, which, as he noted on NPR this week, include burdensome work rules. Here’s one example he cites in his Journal op ed:

A few years ago the UAW even waged a spirited fight to protect the “right” of workers to smoke on the assembly line, something that simply isn’t allowed at, say, Honda’s U.S. factories. Aside from the obvious health risk, what about cigarette ashes falling onto those fine leather seats being bolted into the cars? Why was this even an issue?

In what other industry would this even be tolerated?

Yet even that is not all — then there is the UAW “Jobs Bank,” which keeps allegedly laid-off auto workers on at full salary and not working. This is beyond Soviet. In the former Communist bloc, people had a saying: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Not even pretending to work and getting paid for real beats that every time.

He invokes the Russian “Lada” marque – not that you have to go back to the USSR to see the historic failure of socialism in the auto industry.

7 thoughts on “To Save…What?

  1. When collectivists claim that this is not socialism… They’re technically correct.

    From The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

    Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, [they] sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, [they] did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, [they] left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, [they] controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, [they] denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.

    Who is “they”?…
    http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html

  2. And if Obama has his way, he’ll be telling me to haul the livestock trailer with that so that I can save the planet from global warming. 0-10 in a decade, woo-hoo!

  3. The Michigan automakers need to make drastic changes and they can start by getting rid of those horrendous union contracts and benefits, such as being able to smoke on the line, workers being paid a huge hourly salary, etc. The unions were once useful, but no more. They’re like the rest of their liberal illuminati friends who don’t care if they bankrupt the system–it’s just a means to THEIR ends!!

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