Moronic

Is What This Is. Debating all the little details of a puny few billion (somewhere between 15 and 150 Billion $$$ is what we're talking about here): Terms for Auto Aid; also known as Micromanaging. In a business-as-usual manner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proclaimed "As we consider this legislation, our first priority must be to protect the hard-earned money of the American taxpayer..." Subtext: "We Need It For Our Friends On Wall Street." Sen. McConnell isn't the only one piling on, of course. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), the master-micro-manager of the Senate, while grilling the by now well-toasted "Big Three" CEOs wanted to know if they were going to switch their now-useless SUV plants over to the building of Mini-Buses. His plan: spend taxpayer money to build mini-buses to sell to ride-share programs that cities will fund with, you guessed it, taxpayer money! All this will be funded with IOUs, of course. Then again, some congressman wanted to know if any of this bailout money would be given to Auto Parts Suppliers. Helping them, one would suppose, to make more parts to build cars that nobody will make, on account of nobody will buy them. The (by now well-toasted) CEOs, without batting an eye, or lauging hysterically, said something so non-committal that it ended up as an 18 minute blank spot on the Congressional Record. I'm joking. They said something. It got published. It absolutely made no sense in the context of why or why not anybody should give the "hard-earned money of the American taxpayer..." (Thanx Mitch!) to the automobile industry.
Perhaps they should get the hard-earned etc. etc. because, as noted here, At G.M., Innovation Sacrificed to Profits..."Time and again over the last 30 years, G.M. has spent billions of dollars on innovative ideas"... Only to discard them when they threatened to actually become atually viable in the marketplace. Which, as George M. C. Fisher says, was "probably a mistake, in retrospect.”
Do Ya Think?
Oh: there was also something said by G. Richard Wagoner Jr, the CEO of General Motors (GM) to the effect that it would be impossible for the auto industry to be viable if the market in the USA shrank to Only Ten Million Cars A Year. How anybody could make a living selling only 10,000,000 of something is inconievable to this Chief Executive of Mega-Corporation.

I Googled "buggywhip" AND "bailout", and found (not too surprisingly) "about 156" results. Mostly non-responsive. There was, however, this snippet from The Oil Drum: "as the bailout calls for yet another transfer from poor to rich, ... to pass this legislation unless it includes incentives for buggywhip manufactures. ..." YES! I'm not the only one who wonders why the Buggywhip Companies didn't get a bailout in 1908, but their successors should get one in 2008.

Still, looking at this historically (if that's possible), it seems as though this Laissez-Faire Capitalism adventure is pretty much Darwinian in its lifespan. It grows and grows until it founders from its own Gigantism (is that a word?).
Still seems to me that, instead of frantically trying to get debt-ridden consumers to spend more (see Sixteen Tons), it might be better to ride the tide, and look for a way to ease the transition to a less-unsustainable lower-level of over-consumption.