Last week the dunces driving America’s automobile industry down the washboard road to oblivion, left their corporate jets in Motown and drove hybrid cars to Washington, DC to once again plead their case for a bailout. Having seriously misjudged the symbolic (and, therefore, political) importance of modes of transportation, these transportation moguls were, for a while, the highest-paid drivers in America.

The peculiar character of lame-duck Washington made for a bizarre outcome. Democrats are known for their opposition to corporate welfare but they couldn’t shovel the swag fast enough. They agreed with the United Auto Workers union and the Detroit spittoons that forcing GM, Ford and Chrysler into bankruptcy would be a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions. Republicans, on the other hand, are supposed to love padding corporate nests but their opposition in the Senate brought the whole cause to naught. Politically, the issue was never the fate of auto company stockholders, aftermarket retailers, parts manufacturers or repair shops. The issue was the UAW, whose backside the Democrats need to kiss and the Republicans want to kick.

The union claims to represent 640,000 active members and 500,000 retirees in North America. Even the Cook County Democratic party cannot deliver that many votes in a national election and Democrats needed only to sense that tug on their nose rings to whip themselves into line. Of course, the union opposes using taxpayer dollars to enrich the plutocrats of Detroit as they continue to exploit the toiling masses who are getting poorer by the day, slaving away in inhuman factories to enrich the bloated …

Oops. Actually, the union leaders came with the executives to Washington (perhaps they did the driving). They know better than anyone that their membership will only vote for them and the Democrats so long as their union contracts allow them to live like Republicans. The dirty little secret behind the bailout is that a General Motors, Ford or Chrysler in bankruptcy will be allowed to void all its contracts, including the fattest one – with the UAW. The slab-tubbed execs of autoworld pretend to play nice and chummy with the UAW because they recognize that someone will need to pull the lifeboat’s oars should Uncle Harry Reid and Aunt Nancy Pelosi provide one. Rest assured that if the Republicans have their way, the autoworkers’ union will be the first to be heaved over the gunwales.

Aside from knee-jerk anti-union sentiment, why are the GOP’s standing tall in the tricycle saddle? The short, simple and true answer is that any proposed solution to the nation’s economic woes will bear a Democratic donkey stenciled on its side and killing it is more a matter of impulse than cool reasoning. Repulicans been snoring at the switch for years and the only solace they can take from the late electoral Cannae is that the Democrats will likely do no better. At least, not while the Republicans have anything to say about it.

Meanwhile, American Insurance Group (AIG) almost snuck in under the radar when they awarded 168 top executives “retention bonuses” in lieu of forbidden “performance bonuses”. It’s like this; “performance bonuses” would have required the executives to stroke a check to the Treasury because their performance sucks. AIG’s leadership has decided that it cannot regain its premier place in the American financial landscape without retaining the talent that brought them to the abyss in the first place. “Bob, your underwriting of lint-secured mortgages last year made a doughnut-hole of our financial performance. Since you’re the only guy in the firm who has a clear understanding of fuzzy derivatives, we want to make sure you don’t leave us and start a naval-vacuuming company. Here’s a million bucks courtesy of the taxpayers if you’ll promise to stay on and screw the pooch for at least another year.” AIG claims the bonuses were approved by a “compensation committee” which, to my knowledge, contained no taxpayers. In 2004 AIG’s stock price made it a company valued at 366 billion smackeroos. The United States government now has an 80% stake in a company that is currently valued at $5 billion for which we tapped our collective wallet to the tune of $173 billion proving, lest anyone doubt it, who the biggest fool really is. And for all that dough we still can’t get a peek at the payroll department’s books.

I can almost understand why Citibank is important to the nation’s financial substrate, but why is an insurance company so important? I only have two personal experiences with AIG. They provided workman’s compensation coverage for a state prison project I built in 2002. Every Thursday at 2:00 PM, their agent, Joe, would arrive on site and conduct an unannounced workplace safety audit. Frayed electrical cords, improperly secured safety harnesses and the use of flat-bottomed water cups instead of the required cone-shapes were duly noted and the superintendent would catch hell from the home office as a result. For the record, the site suffered one injury in two years; a roofer who sprained his ankle stepping on a 2 X 4. On the ground. AIG also has a billboard outside my town which boasts that the firm has no lizards or cavemen – just swell insurance. But GEICO has not requested taxpayer loot, despite the fact its name is an acronym for Government Employees Insurance COrporation.

I recall that the necessities of life consist of food, clothing and shelter and the Bible calls us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and provide shelter for the indigent. Gaining heaven does not, however, require us to place them in Cadillac Escalades, finance them at 110% and replace those vehicles should the poor, starving, naked drivers slam them into bridge abutments.

The construction industry can rightly lay claim to providing one of the three necessities mentioned above but, at least this time around, they will not get a nickel of federal largess. The Chrysler website claims that auto industry employment figures argue in favor of the bailout so I did some checking – something I usually don’t bother with. What follows is chock-a-block with numbers, percentages, financial comparisons and other trash, all of which argue against giving your childrens’ money to the auto industry.

According to the industry’s own numbers, 2.9 million souls work for them directly and another 2.5 or so million work for companies that depend on domestic auto factories and retail outlets. That’s 4% of the U.S. workforce. Chrysler does not give any details about who these 2.5 million dependents are or why they will perish if PT Cruisers vanish. I’m sure it includes the lads down at the brake shoe plant, but for all Chrysler is telling us, it might include the lumberjacks who chop down tire trees in Borneo for Firestone and workers in the vital Christmas-tree-shaped-auto-air-freshener industry.

In the not-so-salad-green year of 2008, however, the construction industry directly employees 7,069,000 people or 5.16% of the American non-agricultural workforce. The National Association of Home Builders does not track employment of “dependent industries” as the automakers are so careful to do, but it’s a sure bet that there are fewer job site trailer manufacturers, roach coach drivers and Jiffy-Jonnie cleaners. Twice as many people bang nails and pour concrete in America as weld bumpers in auto factories but no one (except NAHB) is hollering for a mooch-wad of taxpayer dough for that industry.

And what an industry! The residential sector is not just dead; its corpse has rotted and its relatives can’t remember where they buried it. Nevertheless, the remains managed to produce over $310,000,000,000 in shelter last year right here in America and that product will remain in America. Say what you will about the construction industry, the fact remains that you can build Ford Fiestas in Mexico but you can’t build condos in Mexico for yuppies in Chicago.

But you can get Mexicans to come to Chicago illegally and build them. AAAHHH!! Therein lies a hint as to why Detroit may get a boost but carpenters can pound sand instead of nails. Bear with me. About a year ago the AFL-CIO joined forces with civil libertarians and pro-wetback groups to successfully block any attempt by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to effectively verify the citizenship status of workers in America. Now, why would American Labor hinder an effort by the government to collar illegal aliens who, as they will quickly and loudly tell us, take jobs from American workers?

The American labor movement apparently believes that organizing amigos is the key to their future prospects. Stopping DHS and SSA from pinpointing illegal aliens is a token gesture in favor of what the labor bosses see as their future dues check-off constituency.

Wrap-up. The United States Government can actually bail out the auto industry because it is concentrated in three entities. The people who work in that industry are native-born, unionized, registered voters. On the other hand, the construction industry consists (or used to) of thousands of firms whose employees are not, for the most part, unionized and cannot vote because many of them are here illegally.

Most important, even government money will not create housing demand in a market with three years worth of vacant inventory. Neither will government money create new car demand that Honda, BMW, Kia and Toyota cannot easily fill. If no one is ready, willing and able to drive that Lincoln Navigator off the lot, what point is there in subsidizing the firm that keeps making the damn things?

The figures below are only for Ford and GM because Chrysler is privately held and doesn’t have to publicize its incompetence with numbers; merely with pleas for lucre. During the past five years, Ford stock has tumbled from a high of $16.00 to a low of $1.01 per share of common stock. During that same period, GM stock has gone from $53.00 to $4.25 per share. That’s more than $226,427,000,000 of paper value blown through the corporate catalytic converter and it doesn’t even produce pollution as a byproduct. The entire drug-rich nation of Columbia has a lower GDP than that. We are being told that mom, pop, uncle Dave and Rover will suffer a loss of retirement income in their pensions and mutual funds if the Big Three go tango uniform but that’s a shuck! Any mutual fund or pension fund manager who stood by with his thumb up his existential orifice while Ford upchucked 93% of its value is a moron second only to the bigger fools who purchased the shares from them on the downslide.

GM and Ford no longer exist as viable economic entities. Their stock value is less than the resale value of their plants, equipment, real estate, office supplies and whatever “goodwill” they may still possess. The same may be said of Chrysler without the benefit of hard numbers.

There’s an economic law whose name I can’t remember which holds that everyone benefits when people (and companies and nations) do only what they do best and allow others to do what they do best. Americans do not craft coconut-shell brassieres for sale to tourists because there are more palm trees in the South Pacific and the folks there provide all our novelty underwear needs at a very reasonable price. The arrangement allows us to look silly at parties and provides the islanders with a sustainable, if not lavish, livelihood. In due course, the islanders will accumulate sufficient capital to start producing clip-clop sound effects devices which yield more revenue. The crafting of coconut lingerie will move down the artisan food chain to chimpanzees in African rain forests.

But if we stop building cars, how will our economy survive in a competitive world market? We can answer that question by looking at what we did when it was no longer possible for us to produce ships, steel mills and locomotives in a ditto world market. What the American economy does best is think up new ideas. Most of the mechanical and electronic gimcrackery, the manufacturing of which is currently polluting the skies of Japan, Korea and China, was conceived of right here in the good old U. S. of A. We come up with great ideas like motorcars, computer chips, digital television and Wonderbras. Then we license their production in foreign parts (or China just steals them), and get back to the drawing board. Our two biggest categories of exports are agricultural products and entertainment. The world eats our food and dances to our tunes. Our students do poorly on standardized tests compared to children elsewhere because ours is not a culture that emphasizes finding the correct round hole for the proper round peg. Instead, we invent omni-dimensional pegs that can fit into a variety of holes and hire Sri Lankans to make them for us.

The industrial cycle in America has passed beyond making cars, just as it previously passed beyond making ships, steel and boom boxes. Other countries – mostly Asian – have taken our place in these industries because they can do it better and cheaper. They can build Kia’s in Seoul, haul them across the wide Pacific, put them on trains to Hackensack and still sell them for less than a Ford Focus. Before long, Asians will have to find something else to do because South Americans, Africans and, for all we know, Antarctic penguins will be welding cars and smelting pig iron.

We can also finance and insure stuff around the world – or we could until recently. So maybe there’s some justification for giving Junior’s college fund to Citibank and AIG – prime the pump, so to speak, of sectors better-suited to our capabilities and future. Mark Twain understood that thinking and managing were better ways of earning a living than working and doing. Global finance and insurance are the former while assembling cars nobody wants to buy is the latter.

Remember how we sniggered when the new Russian government insisted on subsidizing failed, inefficient former state enterprises of the USSR? The Russkis were trying to keep people employed making clothes people couldn’t wear, cars that wouldn’t run and apartments no one could live in. We lectured them on what a mistake it was to cram capital into places, people and factories that couldn’t use them effectively. When allowed to flow freely, capital will always seek the best return but getting the flow where it’s needed most frequently involves leaving some areas high and dry while others get swamped in a gullywasher. Nevertheless, in the long run (that place where we all end up being), it’s still the best way to achieve prosperity.