About the auto industry bridge loans, he says he is "concerned" about giving money to companies that might not survive, but about the Paulson-demanded bailouts of world banksters, his first statement was that he's by default a "free market guy" but bailing out AIG, Citi, and anybody else whose business is not the production of any kind of durable good, was absolutely necessary. Two problems:
(1) A real "free market guy" -- one who had done his own Econ 101 homework -- would understand that the free market value of any investor class is that each investor succeeds or fails with the success or failure of their own investments. Thus, the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith rewards those who give the people what they want, and withholds rewards from those who fail or neglect to do so. Contractual obligations to pay the salaries, pensions and medical bills of current and former United Auto Workers are not subject to re-negotiation to an honest "free market guy," nor are investors' gains or losses subject to taxpayer-funded exception to a genuine laissez-faire capitalist, which Alan Greenspan and I are, and George Walker Bush, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke are not.
Truly capitalist theory is a populist theory, whose essence is to award more capital to those who do more good to more of the populace, and none to those who do not. Neo-conservatives are obviously not real capitalists by their routine contradictions and evasions, in word and action, of the essential distinction between the free market and the state. In a real free market, the sum of voluntary financial actions of wage earners and the investor class in their pursuit of individual happiness is the economic market, and the State has monopoly on the legal use of force and uses it only to mandate respect for each citizen's unalienable rights, but to pursue no specific group's agenda, even a majority's agenda over any of the universal, unalienable rights of the individual.
(2) Paulson's rationale for the importance of his bailout was the potential inability of large employers to meet payrolls, because they depend so much on credit. That is exactly the problem that has brought GM, Ford and Chrysler to Congress for emergency financial relief.
Their decades-long track record of large, fuel-guzzling vehicles was already being addressed, and in no small part was a response to real market demand, which in turn was influenced by Bush and Exxon's fraudulent propaganda campaigns which gave less-informed Americans the impression that carbon dioxide pollution is less important than it really is. Any outrage toward the automobile manufacturers, however well-placed, is most importantly long past its expiration date, and the near-ubiquitous scapegoating of their employees is just completely idiotic. The major advantage that foreign automakers have is not the average wage or salary of their line worker -- labor is about 8% of costs -- it is that their countries provide health care to every citizen, which by the way is a net financial gain to the country and increases the net purchasing power of their people. The automobile wage gap is negligible, and has more to do with our Congress' failure to set our import tariffs to match the import tariffs imposed on us by foreign automobile exporters.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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