Negative Space: bailout
- Growing from the ruins of a rotting industry
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There’s something incredibly liberating about kicking the ass of a moribund industry.
- Palin: make room for successful businesses
- Governor Palin in India says something I’ve been pushing for a long time, especially with regards to our moribund auto industry: when we reward failing companies, we are killing all of the innovative startups that would have arisen in the vacuum of their failure.
- President Obama talks about NCLB
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In tough economic times, President Obama unveils a new NCLB program to ensure fairness “from Main Street to Wall Street.” Stephen Price Blair goes to the White House to discuss this new program with the President.
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- An Apple what if
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“What if… we had been more concerned about the secretarial jobs and typewriter factories destroyed by Apple? When Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy it had accepted a government bailout rather than working through its problems and emerging stronger than ever? We would have had television commercials with images of typewriter factories saved, and secretaries thanking the government for saving their jobs.”
- The seen and the unseen in Detroit
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“Because most of us lack sufficient imagination, we do not understand what the price of that was. The price isn’t just bailouts and layoffs and factory closings, as painful and convulsive as those have been in Detroit and throughout the industrial communities that inflicted similar problems upon themselves. No, the real cost—the literally incalculable cost—is the lost value that would have been created had all that capital been liberated and put to its best use. We have forgone generations’ worth of compounded returns on investments that we should have made but did not. Another way of putting that: It is far easier to solve the…”
- The Auto Bailout and the Rule of Law
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“This nightmare scenario was never likely to happen. In the absence of a bailout, GM and Chrysler would each have been forced to file for bankruptcy like any other company in their circumstances. It is possible that Chrysler would have then faced liquidation (though even this is questionable, given the value of its assets and its brands). General Motors, however, would almost certainly have been re-organized. In all likelihood, this re-organization would have produced a company more competitive than the one that emerged from the bailout process.”
