Random Commuter Thought

Picking up on the LMC's post below, I have been wondering to myself why exactly Uncle should even be considering bailing out Detroit. Let the Big Three go belly-up! Bankruptcy is a nifty tool for clearing debt, renegotiating ruinous labor contracts and giving a company room to try and come up with a coherent business model.

I'll probably get disinvited from Christmas with the in-laws for saying so, but it seems to me that all this talk of massive cash infusions into the industry is ridiculous: better to take the beast round back and shoot it.

UPDATE: Mitt! has the right idea:

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

Read the rest.

The Derb was talking about this business over at The Corner yesterday and provoked a flood of nostalgic emails about first cars. That got me thinking about mine, which was one of these:

A '66 Ford Mustang. (Mine was red, too.) Dad bought it slightly used a year or so after it was made and drove it all during my yoot. When I was old enough, he handed it over to me. We put better than 270K miles on the thing.

Dad sold the 'Stang while I was off in my first year of college because my sister, who had inherited it, claimed she couldn't master the clutch. I was quite indignant when I came home for Christmas, and even more so when the replacement was revealed to us on Christmas morning: a hideous gun-metal green Chevy Malibu from the mid-70's, which Dad had got on the cheap and had previously been driven by the dealer's mother. I often felt that Sister suffered a suitable punishment by having to drive the thing around town. Eventually, it was totaled while a friend of hers was at the wheel. I've never been completely convinced that this wasn't deliberate.