Would you buy a two-year-old Buick from these men?

Much of the commentary on the proposed automaker bailout has focused on the injustice of bailing them out. Conservatives have blathered about autoworkers making $70 an hour. Liberals have pointed out how badly managed American auto companies are, how they doubled down on gas guzzlers at a time when cheap oil obviously could not go on for much longer.

If you don't think that was obvious, particularly if you think it's still not obvious, here's rhetorical question: Do you really think the Chinese and the Indians are going to stick with bicycles just so you can tootle down the block in your Hummer for a half gallon of organic milk?

Commentary about justice, including my own, misses the point. The decision whether or not to bail out the automakers is, like all the previous bailout decisions, about national self-interest. Would spending the money repay us in the long run? Would the bankruptcy of these companies contribute more to the bankruptcy of our entire economy than the cost of saving them? That's what GM wants Congress to think:

"It's about saving the US economy from a catastrophic collapse," GM chairman Rick Wagoner told the Senate Banking Committee.

Even though it's short money compared to what we've already done, I'm not convinced, especially not under the management of the Bushists. I might consider a bridge loan to get us to Jan. 20 and a competent, much less crony capitalist administration.

Last, a few meta-comments:

• As usual, the conservative viewpoint is viscerally anti-union, and it gets its facts wrong. Autoworkers don't make $70 an hour. They average $28 per hour, or $56,000 per year if there are no furloughs and no overtime hours. The $70 per hour number includes the overhang from retired workers. Most of that is health care and would come off the companies' balance sheets if the U.S. had single payer health care.
• Government intervention in the marketplace can work, can improve our lives. The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are good examples, even though they did not use efficient mechanisms that most economists, probably rightly, prefer. Both attempted to remove from profitability the exploitation of a common resource through price externalities. No, this isn't a non sequitur. If only the federal government had enacted stricter CAFE regulations, GM, Chrysler, and Ford wouldn't be in as deep a hole as they are now.
• The upshot: Industry lobbyists are never focused on the long run, or the carmakers and the UAW wouldn't have opposed single payer and CAFE the way they have. Don't listen to them!

So, when you hear this:

Wagoner said the loans were essential to provide a bridge that can get the automakers safely across "the financial chasm before us," and promised "we will repay the taxpayers' faith many times over."

it's bullshit. He can't possibly know this.

Update (11/24): Here's the straight info. Propagation of the lie continues unabated, of course.

Experience of being right

Let me start by conceding that I would prefer that Obama had more experience with all the issues of the day. At the start of his campaign, I'm sure he knew that his chances were slim, that Hillary had left him only a small opening in her inevitability, that the most likely outcome of the 2008 campaign was national notice for a later campaign.

If all other things were equal, more experience might become decisive. Of course, Obama is a brilliant orator, much better than Bill Clinton, the best speech-making politician since JFK at least. But I can leave aside the delivery of speeches for a moment, even though communication and inspiration are very important parts of a President's job.

The crafting of Obama's speeches shows an intelligence far beyond what Americans are used to hearing. All the time, we hear words come out of Duhbya's mouth and even McCain's mouth that clearly are formulas their speechwriters and political advisers want them to say. They don't own these words. They just read them - badly - off a teleprompter.

Obama owns all his words. They're his thoughts, his policies, his cadences, his vocabulary, his references. The media loves McCain because they used to get the top of his head, even if that changed from day to day. Obama's character comes through in the text of his speeches, and that is very good.

Bill Clinton had a factual mastery that escapes all the Republicans on the scene today except for Dick Cheney. Clinton could shape that mastery into narrative, though not as well as Obama. Cheney can fashion it into bureaucratic infighting par excellence. Oh, and into war.

Sarah Palin has none of this.

Bush aide Matthew Scully was largely responsible for the speech.

After twenty months, she has mastery of Alaska. Maybe. She has a colorful back story, and she wears her lipstick better than a pit bull. She has the experience of being right, hard right. And wrong about practically everything. Her political biography, like Duhbya's before it, is a tissue of convenient, attractive lies. Reformer? Nope. Foreign policy? Don't make me laugh. She's a demographic patch on McCain's political infirmities, nothing more.

Obama, to the contrary, has the experience of being right about the great political issues of our day. The war in Iraq was wrong. Government by that's-tough-you're-on-your-own Republicans is the wrong kind of government. He even knew, unlike Palin, that abstinence is important but not enough.

He is the right person for this time even if he's a tad early to the party. The only question is whether America has the wit and goodness to see this.

Health care for insurance companies

That's what John McCain offers. Faced with the choice between protecting corporations and protecting people, McCain is an orthodox Republican and protects corporations.

And the international evidence on health care costs is overwhelming: the United States has the most privatized system, with the most market competition — and it also has by far the highest health care costs in the world.

Let's be clear: Unregulated markets allocate goods and services to available dollars (or euros, etc.). We regulate some markets so that they will allocate goods and services to people, even if those people don't have dollars. Free markets fundamentally cannot provide universal health care. By definition, they don't even try.

McCain doesn't even really have a plan, just some hoary and useless old conservative maxims. After all, the only way to lower costs for the rich and healthy is to stop healing the poor and sick.