So, is anyone surprised? The ill-conceived, sky-is-falling rush to bail out the banks has led to a line outside the Congress composed of failures with their hands out. Hey, I’ve got a bit of debt I’m carrying I’d like to dump on you, too. That’s right. You. Joe Taxpayer. Dysfunctional entities like the “Big Three,� the state of California, and the city of Philadelphia have come begging.
The automakers have been going down the tubes for more than 20 years. Burdened with ridiculous labor costs and with seized creativity engines, the Japanese ate their lunch long ago. The same hype and PR campaign that the banks used is in play. Falling sky. Saner heads are saying let Detroit fail, go bankrupt, and re-organize with a business plan that might give them a chance. That would make too much sense.
Instead, the conventional wisdom is let’s reward bad behavior. Like the $100 billion or so that’s floating around Louisiana but can’t seem to make it to the Ninth Ward, let’s toss Ford and GM a huge something for nothing and see what happens.
If you were a Congress critter from the Midwest, or even just a Democrat from anywhere, with a hankering to continue to build the constituency with bribes to big labor and big bureaucracy, you’d be nuts to pass up this opportunity to print money and let the bribing begin. Just like the original bailout plan to buy up bad debt has undergone a “never mind� moment, $50 billion to Detroit (on top of $25 billion already printed and sent) is guaranteed to unlock Detroit’s creativity mechanism.
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As far as California or Philadelphia is concerned, you could substitute the word “Connecticut.� Bureaucracies are organisms that follow simple rules. Bureaucrats protect and expand their niche. They are peopled with Peter-principled managers who are defined by incompetence. And their work expands to the time, money, work force, etc. allotted. The “state� is an operational definition of bureaucracy.
Rell is wringing her hands now that the tax pipeline from Fairfield County has sputtered. Well, the “state� is over-extended, over-staffed and has its grubby little hands in stuff it has no business in. Think open-space pay-offs, wetland nazis, luxurious pensions and the like.
Take the example of an automobile accident. Time was, the cops and tow trucks would show up, clear the road, tow the wrecks, throw some sand on the oil stains and back to business as usual. Now roads are closed, haz-mat troops and investigators are on scene, and we can resume driving half a day later. This is the nature of the nanny-state bureaucracy and it has no end. Like GM, Connecticut needs to downsize and reorganize. Somebody needs to say “no.�
There’s talk of a new $500 billion stimulus package. (A friend of mine is ruing the day he didn’t invest in the company that makes the paper they print money on.) And Obama is likened to FDR with plans to WPA and CCC our way out of the doldrums with infrastructure and green centerpiece initiatives. Earth to BHO. This ain’t 1932, when you didn’t need a raft of lawyers and a PR rep to dig a drainage ditch in the backyard.
Peter Chiesa is a Sharon resident who is a semi-retired substance abuse professional.
