It seems as if the Obama Administration will mainly be remembered for two things. Turning over the entire Middle East to the Muslim Brotherhood and badly mishandling the automotive industry.
Controlling what cars people own and how they work is a basic means of social control. Trying to seize control of the industry was a golden opportunity for the nudgers to nudge us into our corner. But the post-bailout GM is acting like the pre-bailout GM, senselessly buying up pieces of foreign car companies that it doesn't actually need, but this time it's doing it in the name of the sustainable energy mantra.
Corporate buying sprees are usually about two things; an incompetent CEO trying to outrace failure with a spurt of activity that convinces the shareholders that he might really be a visionary by picking up companies which are a bad fit (see AOL/Time Warner or AOL/Huffington Post), and they're about a company that can't move its product trying to monopolize the marketplace figuring that people will have to buy its products if it owns a piece of all the manufacturers. All it really does is pile up massive amounts of debt.
This is the same model used by Obama in his expansion of the government, which just goes to show you that the critics who think he couldn't make it in the business world are wrong. He could run GM and he has run GM. And what's bad for GM is bad for America and what's bad for America is bad for GM.
Meanwhile the subsidized electric car industry isn't running too well either. The Volt's problems are well known. This week the Karma had a well-publicized Consumer Reports blowout. It joins a long list of stimulus funds recipient electric car companies and battery manufacturers that have failed.
The Fisker Karma is an apt metaphor for the Obama Administration. It's hideously expensive, heavily hyped and doesn't work.
The problem here isn't the technology. Given time, patience and investors, the technological problems can be licked. But a free market variation of Soviet central planning is going to produce only marginally better results.
The stimulus was used to drive a command economy where the products that the government wanted to see made, got made. And that was doomed from the start.
The government can get things done by throwing enough money and manpower at it. That is how we got to the moon. It will, however, do so inefficiently with huge cost overruns and major problems. The technology will not be mature, there will be serious unexpected problems and the process will be difficult to sustain over the long run.
Product development is a process that requires the whole cycle of striving, testing, failure, reevaluation and eventual success that has been followed by every company trying to make a revolutionary product. Plunking a bunch of laptop batteries into a car, rolling out a snazzy marketing campaign and taking in stimulus money does not lead to a working electric car that everyone will want. It leads to publicized failure.
We're not going to get an electric car by throwing a bunch of money at electric car companies. We're not going to get one by hiking the price of gasoline and then throwing in more tax breaks to electric car buyers. All this social and economic control does not create a working product.
If we are going to have a popular and affordable electric car that works well, it is not going to come from stimulus funds. It will follow the old Ford path, it will be revolutionary because it has met the challenges of the marketplace. Not because it has a sugar daddy in D.C.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.
