The key part of that blog post
"I love western New York, which may be the most beautiful place on earth...
But I can't save it. Pouring government money in has been tried . . . and tried, and tried, and tried. It props up the local construction business, or some company, for a few more years, and then slowly drains away. Western New York has been the lucky recipient of largesse from a generous federal government, a flush state government, and not a few self-made men with happy memories of a childhood there. And still, it dies.
Moreover, it wouldn't be right to save it by destroying someone else's business, killing someone else's town. That's the choice we are facing. At its heart, economics is not about money; it is about resources. Every dollar sent to Detroit buys a yard of steel, a reel of copper wire, an hour of labor that now cannot be consumed by a business that actually produces a profitable, desireable product. It's not right to strangle those businesses in order to steal some air for the dying giants of an earlier day.
And while a financial intervention at least holds out the possibility of creating value for all of us, a bailout of Detroit is definitionally guaranteed to destroy value for the rest of us. Yes, the Big Three and their suppliers will be better off. But we will have taken a limited store of resources and spent them on something that the rest of us value less than the alternative uses for steel, copper, manpower, credit, and so forth."
meganmcardle.theatlantic.com |
