Opposition to the bailout was driven, in part, by the recognition that nationalization of an industrial enterprise is an open invitation to mismanagement and bad public policy. You could easily imagine a scenario in which the Obama administration made its partisan political objectives a key management priority at Government Motors. Alternatively, you could easily imagine a scenario in which Obama administration trade policy became dominated by the narrow interests of Government Motors rather than the broad interests of the American public. There’s a good reason why sensible people don’t normally recommend that the government own manufacturing companies. But these bad things didn’t happen, and given the total lack of private financing for anything at the time the alternative was liquidation rather than reorganization. I think it’s very understandable that Obama’s political foes were not prepared at the time to simply assume that the administration was handle a post-nationalization auto industry in a responsible way.
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