Why Not Just Bring Back Whipping Posts and the Rack?
The Wall Street Journal has yet more bright ideas for solving the auto industry’s problems. For the good of the workers, of course.
In the continuing battle over Detroit, UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger doesn’t seem to get the picture. Let’s help him.
Uh-oh. If the WSJ editorial page were a movie, there’d be banjo music playing right now. Any time the Journal sets out to “help” unions, you know they just want to hear them squeal like a pig.
What, exactly, do they have in mind this time?
[T]here is an alternative that would at least take some of the pressure off wages and benefits — and that’s freeing auto makers to build cars for a profit rather than to meet regulatory mandates. . . .
Mr. Gettelfinger’s should be the loudest voice calling for an end to CAFE, an idiotic scheme that has done little to reduce gasoline demand or oil imports. . . .
Yes, at the end of the day, the 1935 Wagner Act is still to blame for the auto makers’ predicament.
Yep. That’s their plan to help out the president of the UAW:
- Return to pure laissez-faire capitalism with profit-maximization as the only recognizable value, and completely deligitimize the idea of putting any constraints at all – worker rights, environmental protection, energy policy . . . – on the pursuit of profit.
- Abandon fuel economy as a national policy, and encourage the Big Three to “specialize” in gas guzzlers. (Notice, too, that CAFE has the effect of increasing efficiency in gasoline usage; it cannot control total demand, let alone the source of oil used, but it has effectively increased fuel efficiency in new cars and trucks by over 50% cumulatively. In addition, the CAFE standard has reduced fuel usage, by as much as 14% in the study year, according to the National Academy of Sciences. But we don’t hold WSJ to any standard of truth, or even of comprehension of what they’re even criticizing; in their case it wouldn’t be fair to do so.)
- Repeal the federal law guaranteeing unionization rights and collective bargaining.
Aside from their typical religious commitment to screw-the-world capitalism and contempt for environmentalism or public policy generally, the Journal has the gall to “help out” the UAW by advocating the destruction of unions entirely. I think we can rely on the UAW not to take their advice seriously, however. The rest of us can do the country a favor by doing likewise.