I don’t often agree with David Brooks, but he has a good diagnosis today of why Government Motors is doomed to fail:

First, the Obama plan will reduce the influence of commercial outsiders. The best place for fresh thinking could come from outside private investors. But the Obama plan rides roughshod over the current private investors and so discourages future investors. G.M. is now a pariah on Wall Street. Say farewell to a potentially powerful source of external commercial pressure.

Second, the Obama plan entrenches the ancien régime. The old C.E.O. is gone, but he’s been replaced by a veteran insider and similar executive coterie. Meanwhile, the U.A.W. has been given a bigger leadership role. This is the union that fought for job banks, where employees get paid for doing nothing. This is the organization that championed retirement with full benefits at around age 50. This is not an organization that represents fundamental cultural change.

Third, the Obama approach reduces the fear that impels change. The U.S. government will own most of G.M. It would be politically suicidal for the Democrats, or whoever is in power, to pull the plug on the company — now or ever. Therefore, the current managers can rest assured that they never need to fear liquidation again. There will always be federal subsidies for their own mediocrity.

As a taxpayer, I want to divest immediately.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related thoughts from Jim Manzi:

The US government is now the majority owner of the nation’s largest car company. The government has chosen GM’s CEO, Fritz Henderson, and will directly select numerous board members. It will be all but impossible for Congress and various regulatory agencies to avoid meddling with detailed operating decisions.

There is already enormous pressure on GM to abandon the vehicles that make it money — gas-guzzling SUVs and pick-ups — in order to focus on fuel-efficient cars that lose money. I doubt we’ll see many production facilities sent offshore, even if this would make economic sense for GM’s shareholders.

This is a terrible harbinger for the US economy, especially when combined with the Obama administration’s apparently heavy-handed negotiating tactics in favor of Chrysler’s unionized employees at the expense of bondholders.

We appear to be headed for European-style industrial policy circa 1975, with a complicated set of favors being traded between elected officials, government bureaucrats and corporate bureaucrats in semi-private companies.

Great.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Fannie Motors?

[Late morning update]

Obama is busy not running GM:

…while Obama is busy “not running GM” he still has time to make calls to the mayor of Detroit to assure him that GM’s headquarters won’t be moving to Warren, Mich., as it was offered to, but that it will be staying in Detroit.

You know, when the president says he doesn’t want to run GM? I don’t believe him.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Obama says that he has to destroy the village in order to save it:

After a while, the endless, “I have no intention to run GM” pledges begin to sound a bit like the guy insisting he means to eat healthier and cut back on the fatty foods… in a little while.

He actually used the line, “I’m not spending this amount because I want to spend taxpayers dollars; I’m doing this to protect taxpayers”, which I suspect will stir a combination of incredulousness and mockery. Most people who loudly pledge that they don’t want to do something don’t do it.

The wilful suspension of disbelief about this guy from the Dems and the media is astounding.

Who owns socialism?

As Confucius said, “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

One of the insidious tactics of the left over the decades has been to debase the currency of the language, calling themselves “liberals” and “progressives,” and accusing those who disagree with them as “racists,” and “haters.” I refuse to bow to their politically corrosive sophistry. What we are seeing in Washington today is socialism, and fascism, and the two are not opposites, but are in fact closely related.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonah Goldberg has similar thoughts today at USA Today:

The whole spectacle was just too funny for liberal observers. Robert Schlesinger, U.S. News & World Report’s opinion editor, was a typical giggler. He chortled, “What’s really both funny and scary about all of this is how seriously the fringe-nuts in the GOP take it.”

Putting aside the funny and scary notion that it’s “funny and scary” for political professionals to take weighty political issues seriously, there are some fundamental problems with all of this disdain. For starters, why do liberals routinely suggest, even hope, that Obama and the Democrats are leading us into an age of socialism, or social democracy or democratic socialism? (One source of confusion is that these terms are routinely used interchangeably.)

For instance, in (another) fawning interview with President Obama, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham mocks Obama’s critics for considering Obama to be a “crypto-socialist.” This, of course, would be the same Jon Meacham who last February co-authored a cover story with Newsweek’s editor at large (and grandson of the six-time presidential candidate for the American Socialist Part) Evan Thomas titled — wait for it — “We Are All Socialists Now,” in which they argued that the growth of government was making us like a “European,” i.e. socialist, country.

Washington Post columnists Jim Hoagland (a centrist), E.J. Dionne (a liberal) and Harold Meyerson (very, very liberal) have all suggested that Obama intentionally or otherwise is putting us on the path to “social democracy.” Left-wing blogger and Democratic activist Matthew Yglesias last fall hoped that the financial crisis offered a “real opportunity” for “massive socialism.” Polling done by Rasmussen — and touted by Meyerson — shows that while Republicans favor “capitalism” over “socialism” by 11 to 1, Democrats favor capitalism by a mere 39% to 30%. So, again: Is it really crazy to think that there is a constituency for some flavor of socialism in the Democratic Party?

No, it’s not crazy talk. Except when “right wingers” talk about it, of course.

But as he notes, “corporatism” (the economic philosophy of fascism) is the best term for it.

It isn’t:

As we know, most of the stimulus spending does not take place until next year and beyond, so the short-run gains are puny. On the other hand, the big increase in the projected deficit creates the expectation of higher interest rates, which raises interest rates now. These higher interest rates serve to weaken the economy.

According to this standard analysis, the stimulus is going to hurt GDP now, when we could use the most help. Much of the spending will kick in a year or more from now, with multiplier effects following afterward, when the economy will need little, if any, stimulus.

This is the flaw with using spending rather than tax cuts as a stimulus. The lags are longer when you use spending.

Of course, if the real goal is to promote government at the expense of civil society and to create a one-party state in which business success is based on political favoritism, then the stimulus is working exactly as intended.

Yup. But it’s a misnomer to call it “stimulus.”

[Update mid afternoon]

The “reality-based community” has a collision with reality:

Cohn reports how former CBO director and current OMB chief Peter Orszag pressured careerists to assume sizable savings due to proposed reforms. The problem is the bean counters did not believe the alleged savings were justified according to the available evidence…it is interesting that the reality-based Obama crowd, which promised to roll back the “Republican War on Science” is now arguing against what Cohn calls “a super-strict reading of the evidence.”

Well, there’s science, and then there’s, you know, “scientific socialism.” Or maybe they’re just waging a war on math.

[Update late afternoon]

Wishful thinking, not a plan:

Congress is working on a health-care bill to expand coverage mainly by subsidizing insurance for tens of millions of households. This new entitlement is likely to cost $150 billion per year initially and grow, on a per capita basis, at a rate that is about 2 percentage points above GDP growth each year going forward. In other words, the cost of this new program will rise just as rapidly as Medicare and Medicaid spending has for decades now.

Orszag and others are saying, don’t worry, health-information technology, comparative-effectiveness research, more attention to prevention and wellness, and some very modest provider payment reforms in Medicare will make all of this governmental spending — on Medicare, Medicaid, and the new subsidy program — grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past.

But this is an assertion — not a fact. Where’s the evidence to back it up?

“Wishful thinking” is a pretty good summary of Democrat policies in general, both domestic and foreign.