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So the word on FoxNews today was that General Motors -- the largest automobile and truck manufacturer in the United States -- may have to declare bankruptcy, and the other two parts of the Three Stooges may not be far behind.
I say Let Them Die.
I know many of you may be shocked by that, knowing that I am a firm believer in "Buy American" (if for no other reason, than to keep a UAW member off the government tit).
But lately, I have grown tired of the whining coming out of Detroit. Those ratfuckers have spent the last forty years failing to innovate, failing to create great products, failing to lead the market, and failing to run their businesses well.
What was the last, great innovative product line that came out of Detroit? Please?
I'll tell you: the minivan. Yes, the minivan was a big hit at Chrysler when it launched onto the scene in the early 1980s. There's only one problem: the minivan had been conceived by Lee Iacocca in the mid 1960s, and rejected by Ford. Iacocca was coming off his last great innovation -- the Ford Mustang -- and thought that "stand up" version of the venerable station wagon was something that women would clamor for.
He was right. The minivan -- introduced almost twenty years later -- was a huge hit among the soccer mom crowd. Just like the Ford Mustang had been a huge hit among-- you won't believe this -- the new, young, working-class women it was targeted at.
Some reading this might argue that the SUV was a huge innovation from Detroit. It wasn't. When the first CAFE (Corporate Automobile Fuel Economy) Standards hit in the 1980s, the first dinosaur to die was the station wagon. Already wounded horribly by the Carter-inspired Oil Shock of 78-79, the "family funster" was the first sacrificial lamb. SUVs were nothing more than station wagons on truck bodies at the low end. And Chevy Carryalls were quickly converted into Suburbans on the higher end.
My point though: very little innovation from Detroit in forty years, while the Japanese, the Germans, and the Swedes were giving us things like airbags, crumple zones, high-rpm/low-mpg four cylinder engines, and so on. All the while, building much better vehicles that last longer and required less maintenance.
And in that same time, we heard boatloads of whining and crying about how "expensive" it was to build a car in the US, and how manufacturers here couldn't possibly compete with imports. But of course, in the last twenty five years, every major auto manufacturer in the world has been building plants and manufacturing more and more vehicles right here in the good old USA. Funny that you do not hear that kind of whining from Toyota, Nissan, Saturn, BMW, and Volkswagen.
And then there are the unions. The blessed unions. Job killing, economy-crippling organizations if there ever were any. For all of the millions that union members pay for membership, what do unions provide?
Job training? Nope, that is paid for by the company. Ford has an entire facility that thousands go to every day to get "re-trained" for new jobs outside of Ford. Who pays for that? Ford's customers, not the union. The other two stooges have centers just like it, by the way. Thousands of dollars in the cost of every new car sold go to pay people who are no longer making cars for automanufacturers. Only the US Government pays more money to more people to do less work.
Pensions? Wrong again. The Three Stooges cover that.
Health Insurance? Nope.
Other Insurance? Nope.
So what do you unions really deliver for their members? Insulation from the economic realities of the world at large, by protecting jobs that long ago should have been abolished. Work rules that destroy the flexibility any business needs -- from an Orange Julius in the Mall to an international car maker -- to meet product demand and build great products.
But the biggest thing unions provide members these days is the uncertainity of what will happen when the corporate teat goes dry. Feeling good about those dues now?
The Three Stooges have been some of the most foolish businesses to ever inhabit our economic space, and that is saying something given what Gilman Louie did to Spectrum Holobyte/Microprose in the 1990s. Over the last forty years, they have built cars designed to die quicker than their counterparts, designed to require specialty maintenance more often than their counterparts, and designed to prompt their customers to trade in and trade up.
Which gets us to the heart of the problem with the Three Stooges. Long ago, they stopped making money from building great products. They started making money by selling-- over and over again -- crappy products. They make their money by loaning money. Loaning you and me the money to buy their crappy stuff, which had the life expectancy of a squirrel on York Road in rush hour. So we would buy again. And again. And again.
Long ago, they stopped making great cars and trucks. They stopped innovating -- really innovating -- in technology and design and reliability. And that is why the dinosaurs are dying. They cannot compete where it matters most: on building market-making great products.
So let them die. And let them die peacefully.