Eric Reasons

Yesterday I posted about the Wagoner firing being a smokescreen --a bit of PR to throw a scapegoat before an angry mob weary of bailouts. Here are the options: Option 1) GM can build more inexpensive fuel-efficient green cars Option 2) GM can preserve UAW jobs, contracts, and legacy commitments Option 3) GM can be profitable Pick two. The math doesn't work out any other way. It is an impossibility. Analysis: Option #1 is pretty much a given under the current administration and Congress. CAFE standards and a near religious-like zealousness amongst the Democratic party base has pretty much settled this issue. I failed to state that, even though wildly improbable, my preferred method of dealing with this is that we back off the environmental jihad, and let American car companies make cars Americans want and turn a profit. However, GM building more fuel-efficient cars is a federal mandate, because anthropogenic climate change is for all intents and purposes a secular religion, and not...

Today the newspapers were free in Detroit. Not on the web, I mean free. Paper. They picked a helluva day to give away papers. Everyone had one in their hand today. The big red letters jumped off the page: U.S. SHREDS AUTO PLANS I have to agree with James Lileks who sent this out on Twitter today: Maybe I’m old-school, but “President fires CEO” looks as wrong as “Pope fires Missile.” Does not compute. The President has warned that filing bankruptcy may be necessary for GM and Chrysler, but I think this is just hot air, at least as far as GM is concerned. I mentioned that a Green American auto market is a pipe dream back in 2008 before the first bailouts, but I'll sum it up here. Here are the options: Option 1) GM can build more inexpensive fuel-efficient green cars Option 2) GM can preserve UAW jobs, contracts, and legacy commitments Option 3) GM can be profitable Pick two. The math doesn't work out any other way. It is an impossibility. Analysis: Option #1 is pretty much a gi...

It's one thing for Daniel Hannan to have done it. It's another thing for him to realize that he had done it. It's yet another thing for him to realize what it means that he had done it. And it is icing on the cake that he did it with an assault on state-controlled economies. He managed hurl a single well placed stone, and put a crack in collectivist notions of media, politics, and economy with just one shot. A British libertarian hurling well-pointed words at the Prime Minister may not be common, but it's not earth-shattering either. What's amazing is that it ginned up enough interest on the Internet that I've seen it on just about every news program tonight all the way over here on the other side of the Atlantic. Left to their own devices, the European press would never have covered it, let alone the American press. But, as Hannan writes in his blog today : When I woke up this morning, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with messages. Overnight, th...

Listen to every word. Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy I couldn't have agreed more when I posted this last year.

Sen. Banjamin Cardin introduces the newspaper bailout bill . I said it about the banks, I said it about the car companies, and it goes double for newspapers: Capitalism without failure is like Christianity without Hell. I have heard for the past year that capitalism has failed. What has failed is our understanding of capitalism. Investment banks shouldn't leverage themselves 40-to-1. No government oversight caught this problem. But the market did. And when it was revealed that the emperor had no clothes, the investment banks failed for their hubris and stupidity, only to be put on life support by the even greater hubris and stupidity of our government. Every time I hear a politician talking about how there was insufficient oversight of the banking industry, I hear it as an admission that planned economies can not work. Because there can never be enough oversight in a free and dynamic market. There is too much to oversee. The housing market was an artificial bubble for much of th...

Jim Harper over at Cato lays out just how ridiculous Senator Jay Rockefeller's argument is . Even when the worlds best hackers take out some website like the DOJ or the CIA, it's their websites . That's like taking out their radio commercials. It's not critical infrastructure. Rest easy, the important stuff is locked safely away from the Internet freaky-freakies. I love me my Internets, but folks, we don't build critical infrastructure onto it, nor should we. To quote Harper, quoting Tim Lee : [S]ome mission-critical activities, including voting and banking, are carried out via the Internet in some places. But to the extent that that’s true, the lesson of the Estonian attacks isn’t that the Internet is “critical infrastructure” on par with electricity and water, but that it’s stupid to build “critical infrastructure” on top of the public Internet. There’s a reason that banks maintain dedicated infrastructure for financial transactions, that the power grid has a dedi...

Fed 44 : Bills of attainder, ex-post-facto laws, and laws impairing the obligation of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. The two former are expressly prohibited by the declarations prefixed to some of the State constitutions, and all of them are prohibited by the spirit and scope of these fundamental charters. Our own experience has taught us, nevertheless, that additional fences against these dangers ought not to be omitted. Very properly, therefore, have the convention added this constitutional bulwark in favor of personal security and private rights; and I am much deceived if they have not, in so doing, as faithfully consulted the genuine sentiments as the undoubted interests of their constituents. The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases a...