When commenting turns into posting

.

Last week, our blog buddy Harrison wondered why some companies were deemed worthy of a bailout, like Chrysler and General Motors, and why others like Kodak were not.

With specific respect to the domestic auto bailout, we left the following comment (somewhat edited):

The bailout and take-over of GM and Chrysler made zero free-market sense.

Fear-mongering by the Regime led people to believe that both auto makers would simply close up shop if not for government intervention which was simply not true.

An orderly court-supervised bankruptcy would have allowed GM and Chrysler to continue to operate while they got their respective houses in order. It wasn’t like people were not going to buy their cars while they were in bankruptcy. GM and Chrysler could've continued to produce cars while receiving a measure of protection from their creditors. That’s how bankruptcies work (How many people realize that the L.A. Times filed for bankruptcy a couple of years back? Last we checked, their product is still on the news stand every day).

The Regime made a cynical political decision to ride in to “rescue” GM and Chrysler to further their statist agenda, shore up union support and push not-market-ready green technology. How has that all been working out?

As you and we, Harrison, have both been reporting out on, we’ll be lucky if the final tab to the American tax-payers is merely in the tens of billions of dollars.

Claiming the bailout and take-overs of GM and Chrysler as some sort of success story is patently absurd.

.