Nov 212008

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Who killed the U.S. auto industry?

To hear the media tell it, arrogant corporate chiefs failed to foresee the demand for small, fuel-efficient cars and made gas-guzzling road-hog SUVs no one wanted, while the clever, far-sighted Japanese, Germans and Koreans prepared and built for the future.

I dissent. What killed Detroit was Washington, the government of the United States, politicians, journalists and muckrakers who have long harbored a deep animus against the manufacturing class that ran the smokestack industries that won World War II.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Understandably, Republicans are seething.

When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs — assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk — they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Laissez-faire is finished, the all-powerful market that is always right, that’s finished,” said Nicholas Sarkozy, speaking ex cathedra, last month.

As a result, said the diminutive French president, it is “necessary to rebuild the entire global financial and monetary system from the bottom up, the way it was done at Bretton Woods after World War II.”

By Patrick J. Buchanan

For decades, before a heedless congregation, some of us have preached the old Hamiltonian gospel.

Great nations do not have partners. They have competitors and rivals. surpluses are superior to deficits. Tariffs on foreign goods are preferable to taxes on U.S. producers. Manufacturing, not finance, is the muscle of the nation.

Economic independence is vital to political independence.

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