According to a recent article, President Bush’s spokesman, Dana Perino, admitted that the Bush Administration was planning to bail out the GM and Chrysler auto companies, violating the critical liberal free-market concept that bad management will naturally be punished, and good management rewarded. She said that ‘given the current weakened state of the U.S. economy, we will consider other options if necessary – including use of the TARP program – to prevent a collapse of troubled automakers’.
Now, government is certainly a necessary precondition for an effective free market — it broadly guarantees the protection of private property, the enforcement of contracts, the regulation of certain types of interaction (health, safety, and morals), and the power to go to War to protect the national interest — but it should not determine which ideas and companies shall succeed, and which shall fail. Corporatism is inherently unjust.
I swear, if the Congress and Bush had been around 200,000 years ago, Homo erectus would have been bailed out, and Homo sapiens condemned for his success.
sbq