For Love of a Car
Sunday, July 5, 2009 at 05:10PM 
I recently attended a “50’s” themed picnic on a golf course. Americans love their cars, and Los Angeleans, in particular, adore their cars; this picnic was really just an excuse for some of the guys to show off their car collections by parking them on a large rolling lawn.
There they were, these cars, parked on the rolling green grass like primordial animals resting in the sunlight. Sculptures, shiny paint, waxed, chrome sparkling. Beautiful. A Model T. T-Bird. Mustang. A Woodie….
I’ll confess that I’m a typical girl and I don’t have much affinity for motors, mechanics and the like. But looking at the chromed, shiny and waxed cars, the romance of the auto surrounded me and it suddenly made me sad that the era of the auto was passing.
Because now that Obama has nationalized the auto industry, the love affair is over. Bureaucratic central planners, inefficient regulation lovers, don’t build sexy primordial machines; they build Trabants.
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Reader Comments (11)
From the post-war classics to the muscle cars of the 1960 and 70s, Americans designed and built icons. When one thinks of all things American, the sound of a V8 rumbling through chrome exhausts is as alive as any. No government committee will ever create that.
But it's that these are icons of liberty, freedom, speed, personality and America that is their downfall. Two-bob, inadequate, socialist revolutionaries cannot resist attacking the beloved. It's not enough to take as much wealth as possible, they have to insult Americans and their heritage, drag down the icons and topple the marques.
Socialist nations have produced nothing memorable, nothing of beauty, nothing to lift the spirit, because socialism crushes human ingenuity, energy and dreams.
Americana is a glorious rebuke to the dead hand of socialism, that's why Americana so offends these dreary inadequates.
Clearly Obama has killed off the success story that was Detroit.
There's a great Top Gear episode making the same point.
http://www.topgear.com/uk/videos/communist-cars-1
But it's that these are icons of liberty, freedom, speed, personality and America that is their downfall.
What tosh. Their downfall came about because their foreign competitors took their customers from them by producing superior cars. It's called the free market.
Of course those socialist inspired unions had nothing to do with it, did they Peter!
Ernest
There are socialist inspired unions in every western country.
The fatal assault on the US auto industry was made by the Japanese auto companies
The Japanese companies are unionized in Japan, but the Japanese unions are much smarter than the UAW. They want their fair share, the UAW took their share and much more.
A Japanese ( or German, or Korean ) union would always push for higher productivity and would be as hard as the management on a goof off worker. The UAW repeatedly went to bat for unproductive or goofoff workers.
The only car companies in big trouble are those represented by the UAW.
Jimmy - classic.
Phantom - you hit the nail on the head.
Forgive me if I've told this story before, but I have an Irish friend who worked for one summer in an auto plant in Germany, on an assembly line.
He messed something up - an error that would have meant a small defect in the car door. He grinned to another worker who had seen what happened, and was prepared to let the car move down the line. No one would have seen it - not right away anyway.
His German co worker, who was also a union rep, stopped the line, and made sure that the error was completely repaired, despite the fact that this caused them to fall behind. He had a few words with my friend at the time, and had many more, harsh, words with him at the end of the shift.
Germans ( and Japanese ) -still- take quality very seriously. Which is why, despite the fact that Germany is a high cost country, many are willing to pay top dollar for a Mercedes or other German car.
Compare this to the UAW, which whose workforce intentionally vandalized cars on the line in Lordstown, Ohio, over a period of years, and which, in cahoots with bad management, overlooked quality issues all over the country.
It's similar enough to the British autoworker unions, who in the sixties were militant and demanding and protective of bad practices ( workers actually would sleep on the work floor when the mood struck them I understand it ) and who ultimately drove the British car companies out of business.
And now Jackson, as if Motown didn't have enough unnecessary deaths to mourn.
This is a highly informative article on how the US automobile industry was brought to its knees.
http://www.counterpunch.org/fingleton07032009.html