Isn’t it ironic
In my recent post “What’s so bad about redistribution?” I showed how large amounts of funds available to deal with some crisis, such as the credit bailout, caused businesses and people to compete over getting someone else’s money rather than do something productive to make their own. And in another recent post, I mentioned that in the 1950s, GM produced and distributed a comic book version of Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” Hayek’s book was about how socialism is the “road to serfdom,” leading us along a path to poverty and to a loss of our freedoms, as we all become wards of the state. (The entire Reader’s Digest “condensed” version of Hayek’s book is here.)
Well, irony of ironies, in this article from CNBC we now see GM, along with Chrysler, engaging in the socially wasteful lobbying or rent seeking for an extra $10 billion in equity funds from the federal government to support GM-Chrysler merger which is in addition to $25 billion already in the bailout to provide low-interest loans to the US automakers to help them retool to make more fuel efficient cars. On top of that, GM and Chrysler are asking for the federal government to take on nearly $3 billion of their pension obligations.
Have you ever noticed those highway signs “Your tax dollars at work,” or “Built under Governor So-and-So’s Administration.” If McCain and Palin pull out the election, there will be ads for Dodge trucks, “Built Bulldog Palin Tough,” or ads about how so many of their cars are on the road with over 500,000 miles on them, urging buyers to “Drive a McCain.” Or if Obama wins as he probably will, I can see an ad about the comfort and stylish, fuel-efficient Barack that comes with a free tire gauge.
Yes, it is rather ironic that GM, the very company that produced the very serious, but inexpensive comic book version of “The Road to Serfdom” has its hand out, asking much less meekly than Oliver Twist for “more, please,” trying to get taxpayers into GM and Chrsyler’s Hummers, Corvettes and Vipers careening down that “Autobahn to Serfdom.”
-MC