December 11, 2005
Who Killed General Motors?
By Pat
Buchanan
Willys built
the jeeps that carried Ike's armies across Europe. Ford built
the Sherman tanks. Packard made the engines for JFK's PT boat
and for the P-40s of Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers. Studebaker
built the Weasel armored personnel carrier.
Chevrolet
built the engines for the Flying Boxcar, Buick for the B-24 Liberator,
Oldsmobile for the B-25 Mitchell Col. "Jimmy" Doolittle
flew in his "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" raid in 1942.
Nash-Kelvinator
built the Navy Corsair and Hudson the Helldiver that succeeded
the Dauntless dive-bomber that sank four Japanese carriers at
Midway. But no company matched the contributions to victory of
General Motors, the greatest company of them all.
Now, most
of those companies with the legendary names -- Packard, Hudson,
Studebaker, Nash, Oldsmobile -- are gone. Of the "Big Three"
that survive, Chrysler is German-owned, and Ford and GM are bleeding,
and their debt has fallen to junk-bond status. Delphi, the auto-parts
supplier for GM, just declared bankruptcy.
Thanksgiving
week -- its share of the U.S. market down from 46 percent, 30
years ago, to 26 percent today -- GM announced the closing of
nine more American plants and the dismissal of 30,000 more workers.
Many reasons
are given for the decline of the U.S. auto industry. The Volkswagen
"Beetle" that invaded America in the late 1950s, the
Toyotas and Hondas that followed, the Korean Kias coming in today
are, we are told, cheaper and more reliable, and deliver better
mileage. But there is a more basic reason for America's industrial
decline.
A sea change
has taken place in the mindset of our elites. The economic patriotism
of Hamilton and Henry Clay, of Lincoln and T.R. and, yes, of the
Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, who forged America into the mightiest
industrial machine the world had ever seen, is dead.
To the economic
patriots of the Old Republic, trade policy was to be designed
to benefit, first, the American worker. They wanted American families
to have the highest standard of living on earth and U.S. industry
to be superior to that of any and all nations. If this meant favoring
American manufacturers with privileged access to U.S. markets
and keeping foreign goods out with high tariffs, so be it.
But that
Hamiltonian America-First vision that guided us for 150 years
no longer informs our politics. Economic patriotism is dead.
For the
Davos generation of leaders puts the Global Economy first. They
are all good internationalists. If it's good for the Global Economy,
it must be good for America. Theirs is a quasi-religious faith
in that same free-trade ideology for which Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln
and T.R. had only spitting contempt.
And like
Marxists who refuse to question their dogmas, despite manifest
signs of failure, our free-traders believe that everything that
is happening to America has to be happening for the best.
That U.S.
manufacturing that once employed a third of our labor force now
employs perhaps 10 percent does not matter. That the most self-sufficient
nation in history, which produced 96 percent of all that it consumed,
now depends on foreigners for a fourth of its steel, half its
autos and machine tools, two-thirds of its textiles and apparel,
and most of its cameras, bicycles, motorcycles, shoes, TVs, videotape
machines, radios, etc. does not matter.
That tens
of thousands of foreign workers are brought in each year by U.S.
employers to take high-tech jobs, that U.S. factories are shut
down daily here while opening in China, that professional work
is being outsourced to India, that we borrow $2 billion a day
to finance consumption of foreign goods -- none of this matters.
The nation does not matter. The country does not matter. For we
are all now in a Global Economy.
And so,
as the jobs and skills of U.S. manufacturing workers disappear,
and the taxes they pay into Social Security, Medicare, and federal
and state governments fall, and the cost of their pensions is
passed on to taxpayers, and the government goes deeper into debt
to cover rising social costs corporations used to carry, other
countries quietly observe.
Fifty years
ago, a trade deficit of 6 percent of GDP, a hemorrhaging of manufacturing
jobs and a growing dependence on foreign nations for the vital
necessities of our national life would have been taken as signs
of the decline and fall of a great nation.
Our elites
tell us that we have simply not read Thomas Friedman, we do not
understand that the old Hobbesian world is history, that we have
entered a new era of interdependence, where democracy and free
markets will flourish and usher us all into a golden age -- and
we Americans will lead the way.
If they
are right, we are Cassandras. If they are wrong, they are fools
who sold out the greatest country in all history for a mess of
potage.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
