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Posted by D Sherman on Monday, December 15, 2008 at 13:57:39 :
In Reply to: Threat of failure can be a great motivator posted by 48PW on Monday, December 15, 2008 at 13:29:12 :
You can't stay in business for long unless one of two things is true. Either A) you provide something that people want to buy and will pay a price for that's profitable or B) you have a government subsidy. A lot of people want to move the whole US auto industry from the A) to the B) category. That 10 million jobs figure is BS. It assumes that if GMC goes bankrupt, nobody will buy, drive, or maintain motor vehicles any more. That's ridiculous. People will keep buying vehicles, they'll just buy them from other companies. And they'll keep fueling and maintaining their GMC vehicles. Probably even a lot of the people who used to build parts and vehicles for GMC will keep working for whoever buys the pieces of GMC out of bankruptcy.
This whole business of 10% of American jobs disappearing of "Detroit" (actually just GM) goes bust reminds me of when they were having the big fight over old-growth logging and people were saying that if we stopped logging the old growth, everybody would have to go back to living in caves.
If it was right for the government to subsidize dying industries just because they were big, we'd still have companies building gas lights, buggy whips, steam locomotives, and horse drawn reapers (at taxpayer expense), just because lots of people would be out of work if we let those industries go away.
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