David Brooks, much enamored of Barack Obama’s brilliant mind and dazzling temperament, is fretful. The auto bailout is the cause. He observes:

There seems to be no one who believes the companies are viable without radical change. A federal cash infusion will not infuse wisdom into management. It will not reduce labor costs. It will not attract talented new employees. . . In short, a bailout will not solve anything — just postpone things. If this goes through, Big Three executives will make decisions knowing that whatever happens, Uncle Sam will bail them out — just like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In the meantime, capital that could have gone to successful companies and programs will be directed toward companies with a history of using it badly.

Well, Barack Obama is someone who seems to think it is a good idea to give the auto companies a bailout. Doesn’t he know better? Or is he already a captive of the special interest groups?

But that isn’t the worst of it, according to Brooks:

The second part of Obama’s plan is the creation of an auto czar with vague duties. Other smart people have called for such a czar to reorganize the companies and force the companies to fully embrace green technology and other good things. That would be great, but if Obama was such a fervent believer in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats, he should have mentioned it during the campaign. Are we really to believe there exists a czar omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent enough to know how to fix the Big Three? Who is this deity? Are we to believe that political influence will miraculously disappear, that the czar would have absolute power over unions, management, Congress and the White House? Please.

Perhaps Brooks missed it, but at every turn during the campaign, Obama gave us plenty of warning that he believes “in the Chinese model of all-powerful technocrats.” Government bureaucrats are going to control lots of things in the Obama administration. They are going to decide which size of business must carry health insurance, and the type of insurance they must have. They are going to decide what type of energy is worth subsidizing, and which projects will get billions in taxpayer funding. They are going to tell the whole world the labor standards they must abide by in order to trade with us. And on it goes. It really isn’t quite fair to say we were not warned. Maybe not on this particular item. But Obama’s penchant for having the “deity” of government command and control a great many things was hard to miss during the campaign.

So what happens if, in January, the Democratic Congress passes, and President Obama signs, an auto bailout? This would show downright economic ignorance on Obama’s part, revealing the new President to be either less bright or less courageous than the pundits assured us he was. We will see if the scales fall from their eyes. But make no mistake: they were warned that this is exactly the sort of thing Obama would favor.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 11:29 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.