How would you feel if you were driving a foreign car in the United States and suddenly discovered General Motors had been handed the ability to enforce regulations against your automotive brand of choice in an effort to influence you to buy their product?
If you’re like most people (since the days preceding the original Boston Tea Party) you’re going to be angry and resentful at the attempt to restrict your freedoms.
And you’re going to recognize that the power wielded by GM is a conflict of interest within the industry.
It’s essentially unfair in a free market
And it’s the first step toward the formation of a monopoly.
You’re also probably wondering how this could happen, where your rights have gone, and who gave GM this power. Then you remember that GM is now Government Motors and it all makes sense, while simultaneously becoming all the more infuriating, because we now realize that GM already does have this power.
When the federal government purchased General Motors and Chrysler with our tax dollars, nationalizing the American auto industry and preserving the unions through an expensive bankruptcy process, a large number of us saw the creeping hand of socialism asserting itself in our previously capitalist society.
What went unnoticed or unacknowledged at the time was that this was but the first phase in controlling the products Americans would be forced to buy, and a chilling vision of what awaits us with the new health care reform.
Through the so-called “bailouts” of GM and Chrysler, the government effectively purchased control of the companies by demanding something in return for their–or more accurately — our –money. This led to a number of government bureaucrats being installed on the boards of directors, along with President Obama demonstrating he had somehow acquired the ability to fire GM’s CEO in order to flex his muscle and prove he was taking an active role in “fixing” the problem.
All of this allowed the government to take charge of GM and Chrysler from the top down, wielding power through policy wonks who had no previous experience in the auto industry, or even in business in general, because the government decided that the best people to clean up this problem were the ones who had no background, experience, or talent in dealing with the matter at hand.
Of course this led to both companies immediately entering bankruptcy, but that was always the plan.
Government control of both the companies and the process led to the unions surviving bankruptcy–the only event which could have eliminated them–and acquiring even more power over the auto makers.
Government conveniently overlooked that the unions were the greatest cause of the companies’ problems in the first place. The end result, in short, was the United States government using our money to buy control of a major portion of American industry and asserting power in a claim that they could best fix the root cause of the companies’ problems by effectively ensuring those problems would flourish well into the future.
The most immediate prediction for what awaited Government Motors and Chrysler was that they would be making expensive and inefficient products that no one wanted anything to do with, because, after all, what else has government ever done?
We could only wish it had been that simple and that our tax dollars would be propping up another useless segment of government we would never get anyone out of.
Instead, the government has begun using the American auto manufacturers as a beachhead from which to begin their assault on automakers worldwide.
This first became apparent when Toyota came under government pressure. The world’s leading auto manufacturer suddenly came under intense scrutiny of the American government within a year of the government’s takeover of their competition.
That alone might have been a coincidence, if not for GM immediately stepping forth with an ad campaign to steal customers from Toyota by offering special savings to customers who traded in their “dangerous” Toyotas for new GM vehicles. GM’s response to Toyota’s misfortunes was uncharacteristically swift and might be attributed to the shiny new government appointees on its board, but not because of their slick marketing abilities so much as their colleagues who determine when Toyota has a “problem” and how serious it is. Honda soon came under pressure to also issue previously rare recalls (though for far less serious concerns) and a pattern has begun to emerge.
This sort of scrutiny, under the guise of “protecting the consumer,” could have the potential to severely damage any non-government-owned auto manufacturer the government sees fit to attack.
The federal government now has an investment in seeing GM and Chrysler succeed, but don’t expect that means the government will try in any manner to improve these companies.
After all, the people the government has put in charge of these companies don’t know anything about the auto business and what makes it work.
What they do know about is dirty politics.
For example: buying votes and making the other guy look bad. As a general rule, the government has no idea how to improve anything, but the one thing it has consistently shown itself to be very good at is getting in the way of a free market economy. Expect the government to try any way it can to make the car you want to drive unappealing until they have you driving the car they want you in.
Meanwhile, GM will not be building better cars; their unofficial business plan will be to make themselves look good by attempting to drag everyone else down to their level. In fact, they will most-likely build products far inferior to what they had previously produced due to their board of directors mandating “eco-friendly” policies over such “trivial” things as appearance and safety features.
That brings us to the health care you will be forced to turn to if you are ever unfortunate enough to be involved in a collision with nothing more than the ultra-light shell of a 2011+ GM vehicle to protect you.
Those who voted for the bill have been quite adamant that there is not a public option in the bill and that people will be able to keep their current health care coverage if they so desire.
However, the only people who ever fell for that lie were the congressmen whose arms had to be twisted to vote for the bill because, as presented (and that word is important), it was not expansive enough to earn their support.
What eventually changed the minds of these congressmen was the backroom revelation by the people pushing the bill that their legislation was laying the groundwork for the destruction of private insurance companies and the necessity for government intervention in the form of the government option.
The massive health care reform is so punitive to private insurance companies that they will be lucky to survive more than a couple years, and starting next year premiums will increase astronomically as these companies are forced to meet government demands.
As customers flee these companies and the companies then collapse, there will be no alternative but for the government to step in and provide an “option.” Health care costs will still rise in the form of higher taxes, and anyone who does not buy into coverage will still be forced to pay in the form of a fine.
What we see is the federal government again, though far more efficiently this time, using its power to destroy private industry and make the public dependent with nowhere else to turn. And if anyone thinks they’re going to be getting more for their health care dollar than they were the first time around, they have a nasty surprise waiting for them in the form of a smaller paycheck.
In summary, the federal government used our tax dollars to buy its way into the auto industry, then set about using its power to handicap the competition down to their level in hopes that we will all soon be driving the cars they want us to drive.
It then created legislation aimed at destroying private insurance companies so that we would be forced to pay higher taxes in return for the inferior coverage and service of a “government option.”
What we see are the first two examples of a rapidly-expanding federal government taking over massive segments of the economy and creating a monopoly which leaves us with nowhere else to go. What we see is socialism. The health reform bill is so massive that it essentially gives the government the ability to dictate to citizens exactly how they must behave to receive coverage, meaning that for our own “health,” we might one day be required to drive GM vehicles anyway, effectively cutting out the middle-man of foreign vehicle recalls altogether.
Someday, when you’re driving your Government Motors golf cart to your closest doctor (two-hundred miles away) to find out whether the government is willing to use any of the tax dollars you have paid into public health care to heal you or whether they might just decide to put you down, you might be angry and resentful of your loss of freedoms.
You might wonder how this happened in a free market economy and where your rights have gone. Then you’ll remember the so-called “bailouts” of the auto industry and “health care reform” and you will know that this day has arrived.
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