Bye American

When it comes to finding fault with the long-term behavior of an industry, America's big three auto makers really can't be beat.

They have spent many tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and every state legislature in the country to minimize, eliminate, reduce or abolish virtually ALL standards relating to automobiles: Safety standards. Crash-test standards. Mileage standards. Emission/pollution standards.

For forty or more years they have bribed, cajoled, arm-twisted and manipulated, by fair means and foul, every public official and public body that they could get to go easy on their industry, gain protection from competition, benefit themselves at the expense of the American people, ignore pollution and global warming indicators, etc.

So with the possible exception of Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big Chemical, Big Medical and Big Pretty Much Anything, there is hardly an industry that more deserves to fail.

However, and despite how much the American auto industry and generations of its leaders deserve our contempt and strong sense of "what goes around comes around / it's about time," there is another group of people that is even MORE responsible for the demise of the Big Three than a half-century's worth of poor leadership.

And that is the American public.

Or rather, that portion of the American public that I call the "patriotic idiots."

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There are several essential elements in a free market, things that must be in place and working in order for a free economy to function properly. The law of supply and demand, for example, has to be allowed to work--i.e., be free of government control--in order for an economy to work. If you mess with the laws of supply and demand, bad things are going to happen. Imposing price or wage controls, for example, artifically distorts supply-and-demand relationships, creating scarcity of needed goods/services and abundance of unneeded ones.

Another key component of a functioning economy is feedback. When you buy goods or services, you send a message to the provider of those services that you like what she is providing. You also send a message to his competitor that you do NOT like what she is selling. So one provider invests additional resources in doing the same thing, because she is getting encouraging feedback from the market. The other provider says, hmmm, I better do something differently, people aren't buying my stuff. So he changes strategy and builds a better mousetrap, or reduces the price of existing mousetraps, or paints his mousetraps bright yellow, or improves the operation of the trap, or does any one of a thousand things to get people to buy her mousetrap. If she's not successful in attracting buyers, then he goes out of business or finds something else to do.

That's how a real economy works. Especially here in America, where we claim to be such free-market practitioners.

But let's say you're a patriotic idiot, and you base your buying decisions NOT on the best value and the best products and the best services that you can find/buy/afford, but instead on the country of origin of those those goods and services. You don't buy the best products you can, but instead you buy those that are made closest to your home. You do this because (a) you're an idiot and don't understand basic market economics, and (b) you're an idiot and think that it's up to you to make personal sacrifices so as to benefit some particular business interest, and (c) the providers of inferior goods and services spend lots of money on advertising to tell you and the rest of us idiots that you should forego your own best interests and spend your money on their inferior products because "it's good for America" (or Japan or France or wherever the ruse is taking place).

You go down to your local car dealer and you give her your money and you say, "I don't care that your cars get bad mileage, and that their resale value is low, and that you spend more money on marketing that you do on engineering. I'm going to buy your car anyway because it's made in Detroit and I will only support American workers."

Now imagine if ten or fifty million or a hundred million people do this for forty years. What are the Detroit automakers going to understand? That it's okay to build cars that get bad mileage, and that have low resale values because of poor overall qulity, and that spending money on lobbying and advertising is the way to go. So year after year after year the Detroit automakers are being sent erroneous, wrong-headed, misguided data from the patriotic idiots who are slowly destroying our auto industry.

The only thing that was required of the patriotic idiots was that they buy the best car they could; Detroit would have gotten the message and started making better cars. But the patriotic idiots are idiots, remember, and they they let the endless "Buy American" advertising campaigns convince them to spend their money on inferior cars.

It turns out—as always—that appeals to the idiots' patriotism was really just a ploy to get their money. It had nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with how to get rich while making low-quality cars and convincing gullible consumers that you give a shit about them.

So now, when the fecal matter is encountering the air circulation device, the patriotic idiots can contemplate how it is that their rah-rah buy-American wave the flag patriotism is largely responsible for destroying the American auto industry and the hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of jobs that are going with it.

Hey, thanks a lot, Mr. & Ms. Patriot. This is what all those wonderful "heartland values" get you. And if it were JUST you, that wouldn't be so bad. But your nationalistic, wrong-headed, me-and-mine-first attitudes unfortunately spill over onto the rest of us, and we don't appreciate it.

Your "Buy American" attitudes led directly to the "Bye American" auto industry.