Another Quart of Oil

Over the years I have owned lots of automobiles. Most of them served me very well but a few turned out to be real clunkers solely because of my scrape heap strategy. My resistance to intervention was caused by a steady divorce from reality. I guess one could say I had my head in the sand but in reality my head was in the bottle. I remember two vehicles that used a quart of oil every 600 miles. When your car is burning oil at that rate you have few choices. Buy quart after quart and watch your money go up in smoke, scrape it and try to manage with out an automobile or overhaul the engine and keep it running for a long time.
The Congressional bailout of the United States automobile industry amounts to another quart of oil. These are the same people who opposed seat belts, rear view mirrors, fuel efficient and safer cars because it would make them less competitive on the world market. They will never overhaul their engines!
As far as I can see, American automobile companies only do two things very well. They are really good at lobbying Congress and they sure have some slick ads during the Super Bowl. So I guess the bailout money means more GM people in Washington and flasher ads during the Super Bowl game. I really don't care about how many GM people there are in Washington DC but when I see my tax dollars at work during the Super Bowl that's simply going to ruin my football experience. Its bad enough for the game to be interrupted every three minutes with a commercial but now I've got to pay for the interruptions.
Subsidizing the automobile industry is not going to solve the problem. It will simply perpetuate an unproductive structure which will almost guarantee bigger problems later on. Throwing tax payers money into a sink hole called the US automobile industry is tantamount to a transfer of wealth from tax payers to GM employees. I wonder if those employees get as mad as I do when the Super Bowl is interrupted every three minutes by a commercial from a bankrupted car company? I bet they don't and shine with pride knowing the American tax payer writes their pay check every week.
For all practical purposes the Big Three have already failed , only the formality of the failure is missing. In capitalism the consequences of failing to compete are that you vanish, making way for more efficient organizations. That's how the economy rejuvenates itself. If the government is going to write a fat check to the automobile industry it might as well write a fat check to the music industry letting them build more record players and try to convince us to put away our I-Pods. If the car manufactures were able to convince us we all need to be driving SUVs, surly the music industry can convince us our I Pods are dinosaurs. Come to think of it maybe more record players would not be such a bad ideal, at least I would not have to add a quart of oil after 600 songs and watch smoke come out through the speakers.