Feeding Time
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- June
- 2
(A small tip of the hat to Thomas Nast with this cartoon.)
I hate when I get all skeptical, but I can’t help feeling the nationalization of GM is going to simply kick the day-of-reckoning can further down the road. When I was a kid growing up in Britain, I remember watching Maggie Thatcher nationalize British Leyland, which was a long, expensive disaster. Like GM, the workers who built the cars had become so politically organized, powerful and expensive that the cars themselves simply became an unprofitable sideshow. The spiral affect of a car company existing purely to keep its adversarial workers paid was that BL cars earned notoriety for their utter crapiness in both design and quality, therefore losing market share, thereby requiring more infusions of taxpayer money to keep workers employed. Even with vast amounts of government financial lubrication, BL eventually collapsed under its own automotive irrelevance.
Admittedly, the situation is somewhat different in America in 2009. In Britain there was a cripplingly high rate of inflation that was salting the economic wound. But there are some alarming similarities to the British nationalization model in the GM takeover. I really hope we don’t make the same expensive mistakes. If GM is allowed by the unions and politicians to lavish its focus on car-buying customers, they – and the automotive workers – will survive.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 11:12 am by Matt Davies.
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Now explain to me why a car company can’t fail?
It’s their own fault for not allowing competition with smaller manufacturers. remember Tucker?
all but 2 or 3 of his cars are still on the road. go figure…
Absolutely the perfect cartoon for the GM -government deal! I just read the newspaper and was thinking that all of us will be saddled with the worker’s needs for many years ahead. Great Cartoon!
Matt—You are definitely one of the best cartoonists out there. The art on this is absolutely freaking BRILLIANT! Make sure not to put your hand in that gaping maw.
Bravo!
On a less adulatory note… I agree that this will be a long and expensive can-kicking adventure. However, if Universal Health Care becomes a reality, once we get past the initial cost of that, it could help bring down the legacy cost of union promises. I also fear that this situation might further weaken the unions as the whole taxpayer base is now eyeballing them. If we’re ponying up to keep GM afloat, even pro-union folks like myself will be demanding concessions in hopes of avoiding the debacle of which you speak.—L
Ummm. Margaret Thatcher didn’t nationalise a thing in her whole life Matt.
British Leyland went publicly owned in 1975…4 years before the glorious revolution.
Purity is right. I should have known better about Maggie, of course. My memory of the wars between her and the auto unions served to awaken my juvenile political awareness – Though evidently it didn’t awaken too much awareness.
She inherited the precision machine known as British Leyland. Then crushed it.