This Is Your Government...

...and this is your government on stupid. Ahh, yes, nothing like the sweet smell of government takeovers to start your week off right, huh? Indeed, having decided that Chapter 11 was too harsh for it to accept and that 'bailout' was its only option, GM now gets to find out the hard way what us free-marketers were warning them about all along - that public funding for your business also means public management of your business.

Not that the folks at GM have any illusions about what they're getting into though, Rick Wagoner was happy to go, and he'll take the $20 Million dollar retirement package that comes with termination of his job to go with him thank-you-very-much, and the new CEO has already said he knows that he's not going to be the one who's actually in charge.

The result is that President Barack Obama, the man who is a lawyer by training and a Law Professor/Community Organizer/Professional Campaigner by vocation is now fully and totally in charge of running, nay saving, the 9th largest corporation in the entire world. Oh yes, and he'll be accompanied in this task by a Treasury Secretary who can't properly fill out his tax returns and has an entire staff of people who are....yet to be appointed by the President. (And likely Congress too, but you really don't want us to get started on those fuckers right now.)

Anyone else really wish a guy like Mitt Romney, who, you know, understands this kind of shit, was President right about now? Of course, Mitt suggested, way back in December, that we shouldn't have bailed these bastards out in the first place because, shocka, by not making them file for Chapter 11 we were 'bailing them out' of the serious internal restructuring that they needed to do to remain viable. Instead, with bailouts, we would just be turning them into another welfare recipient (albeit an insanely expensive one).

Here's the thing though, as the nice little parting gift that former CEO Wagoner got helps to demonstrate, by bailing these assholes out we have subsidized their bad decision-making process. Instead of being forced to account for the $38 billion in losses they took last year by doing things like eliminating bad Union deals, cutting out their CEO's golden parachute, or generally figuring out what the hell they were doing so terribly wrong that it cost them $38 Billion, they're going to simply sit around and wait for whatever the government's next batch of instructions are. Moreover, how can we possibly blame them for doing just that?

Afterall, by giving them this bailout(/subsidy) we've now incentivized this corporate laziness; because now the company's money isn't coming from it's ability to sell automobiles, but rather its ability to grovel like a cheating husband at the feet of its new Government overlords. In other words, we're expecting this company to be able right the metaphorical ship despite having eliminated the incentives that might make it profitable again, and having turned its management over to people who have neither a direct financial stake in its future profitability nor the proper credentials to hold such positions.

Brilliant.

Of course, that, in a nutshell, is why the Government shouldn't run businesses - because their intervention, particularly on this massive of a scale, screws up the profit motive that is the driving force of capitalism. And honestly, if you don't understand why that's a bad thing (or why Capitalism is a better corporate manager than the effin Government), then you're either a hippie, a fascist, or a communist - in which case you'd be too far gone for me to give a damn about you at this point anyways.

Now, with apologies for all the cussing above, and in an attempt to make you feel even worse, here's the internet's newest viral video star, Daniel Hannan, a Conservative Party member of the European Parliament for England, on how, in addition to spending ourselves into oblivion, the Anglo-Saxon world now has to endure the additional humiliation of having the Germans and the French being the ones telling us that we must step away from the bailout trough:

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(For those of you who have, sadly, missed out on the Daniel Hannan craze, please, for the love of God, go watch this short video of the speech he made eviscerating Gordon Brown (and bailouts) at the European Parliament last week. I promise it'll make your day.)

***Update***

Irony alert: the new CEO of GM now says that Chapter 11 actually looks pretty good. It only took them a few months, a government takeover of their management structure, and a few billion taxpayer dollars, but at least they might finally be on the right track...