Pruning

When you’ve got a sick tree on your hands, you prune away the dead and dying branches to give the rest of the tree the best chance possible for recovery. I don’t have anything against General Motors or against the UAW but is propping up General Motors the strategy most likely to result in a vibrant auto industry? Or even the most robust possible UAW? I don’t see it. Quite to the contrary I think it’s the strategy most likely to sap the strength of the industry in the forlorn hope of keeping a dying branch that’s already a skeleton of its former self alive.

Today the Washington Post’s editorial board is trying to figure out if that poke contains a suckling pig or a rat:

The ultimate question is whether a state-owned GM can consistently make cars that Americans want to buy, something a privately owned GM has not been doing sufficiently for many years. Ideally, the federal government would make GM’s job easier by staying out of business decisions, as Mr. Obama has promised. In practice, the political manipulation of the company has probably only just begun; Democratic Rep. Eliot L. Engel (N.Y), for example, has declared that the government should require GM to install “flex fuel” technology in its cars. If GM still isn’t profitable enough to attract private investment a couple of years from now, the pressure will be intense to shovel even more public money into it. Administration officials say they hope and expect that this $30 billion for GM will be the last. But they don’t promise, because they can’t.

The Administration has already committed to rescuing a company whose workforce if all goes according to plan will be about that of Verizon or FedEx and less than those of IBM or UPS. What’s the smallest company that’s worth intervening to save?