Important news for pedants

Toyota has vindicated my claim that the plural of Prius is Prii.

I feel so much better now. I await a similar press release from the US Census Bureau regarding the plural of "census".

Via: instapundit

Government motors

Greg Mankiw has an update on things over at GM. I wonder if anyone could have predicted this sort of thing? Maybe there are even models.

Nothing screams fairness, efficiency or good government like having resources allocated based on who is friends with politicians.

Sigh.

Reason interview with P.J.O'Rourke

Criticizing the auto bailout from the left

William Grieder at the Nation laments the (relative, to be sure) lack of economic nationalism in the auto bailout.

In contrast, I lament the decline of internationalism on the left. In my view, the old left had it right when it coded nationalism as a way to distract the public's attention from more important issues.

Moreover, the old left's internationalism also avoided the racism that sometimes seems implicit in concerns about "exporting jobs".

Car Dealer in Chief, indeed.

A good column by David Brooks of the NYT on the Big 3 here.

I will confess that my first reaction was that the firms and the government had jointly decided that the first round restructuring plans from GM ("Government Motors") and Chrysler would be rejected so as to give the firms more leverage with their unions and creditors and to give Obama a chance to look tough and get some populist poll points with the pitchfork people.

A Lada fun here.

Feeling badly about Detroit and the big three automakers? It could be worse!

Enjoy this British video on the great automobiles produced under communism. It even includes Spanish (or are they Portuguese?) subtitles.

In graduate school, I knew a sociology graduate student who had a Yugo, and even rode in the Yugo a few times. As I recall, one day one of the doors just fell off of its own accord.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Some automobile humor

Hat tip: Nat Wilcox

That giant flushing sound you hear ...

... is called the bailout.

I even got to see Ed Lazear (presently chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and former U of Chicago b-school professor) defending the bailout last night to Judy Woodruff of the News Hour. Talk about role reversal! To be honest this gives me a bit of pause, because Ed is a very smart fellow and has access to information that I do not have, but at the same time I have no way of knowing if Ed really believes what he was saying on the News Hour or if he was just doing his job as part of the president's team.

Here is a very fine post by Megan McArdle at the Atlantic about how things got this way in certain parts of the US auto industry.

Addendum: In addition to his many fine scholarly articles, Ed is perhaps best known for saying that "if you don't miss the plane sometimes, you are not doing it right."

Addendum 2: The economist weighs in on the bailout.

Burtless on the Bailing out the Big Three

Gary Burtless of Brookings offers his views here. He favors a bailout with tough conditions rather than some form of bankruptcy, whether guided or not. Some of the arguments are familiar and, I think, weak. These have to do with reductions in demand due to bankruptcy. These issues are, of course, empirical questions. It would be nice to see some evidence on them from either side of the debate. Absent that, it seems clear that auto companies can offer third-party warranties and that a parts market will continue to exist as long as willing buyers exist. In terms of the parts market, the situation is no different from someone buying a model that is being replaced just prior to its replacement. A simple analysis of, for example, the effect of the elimination of the Buick brand on the resale price of Buicks would add a lot of value here.

The argument Gary makes about the government having already bailed out AIG and other financial institutions is a complete red herring, as Gary, being quite a smart fellow in my experiences with him, surely knows. The industries are different, the problems with the firms are different and "equal treatment" is not a good basis for policy in this area.

Gary seems to assign a much higher probability to the Big Three firms disappearing under bankruptcy than I do. This is odd, because it suggests that he has a more negative view about the firms' long term economic viability than I do. If the firms are not viable, they should go under. I suspect they are viable with new labor contracts and with their pension obligations partly offloaded on the government and partly reduced through cuts. The necessary trimming seems to me more likely to occur in a bankruptcy court, which is not subject to lobbying, than in Congress where the setting of ostensibly tough conditions is likely to fall victim to lobbying by the firms themselves and their friends in the UAW. That is part of what the private jets are for, after all. The counterargument on this score is the Chrysler experience, where conditions were imposed that apparently aided firm viability. More empirical evidence on this score would be useful as well, to sort out the effects of the conditions applied as part of the bailout from general economic improvements.