RIP General Motors Corporation and American Capitalism

One news story that slipped beneath the radar last year was the fact that General Motors Corporation died last year, after 103 years of building quality automobiles. For most of the last century, General Motors Corporation was the world's largest corporation, but at the end of its life, government authorities circumvented the usual bankruptcy process and broke off 'old GM' from 'new GM'.  'New GM', or General Motors Company, was taken over by the government and the unions and given $50 billion dollars, while 'old GM' was put into bankruptcy and the million plus investors who had given their hard earned money to the company lost everything. 'Old GM' spent its final years shutting down dealerships, divesting itself of properties, and attempting to salvage whatever it could from its assets, but with its final death this December it will leave many bills forever unpaid and many properties languishing in weeds and ruin.

The truth of the matter is that the auto bailout, which is celebrated by many in the United States as a success, was anything but- the bailout orchestrated by Congress and the President ruined investors, shook the faith in many more about the future of true capitalism, ruined all those who were still owed money by GM, ruined the communities that now have the abandoned factories and dealerships and buildings in them, and left a mass of wreckage behind. Many bondholders, who took their life savings and invested it in General Motors, lost everything, even though they should have been the first to receive payment in the event of a bankruptcy.

General Motors Company may have survived, and with it thousands of jobs and the ability to make cars in the United States, but the deal it made- accepting taxpayer money and union control and government support- was the kind of deal typical to tyrannies and corporatist states, not a nation built on individual responsibility, freedom to make mistakes, and property protection through long-established bankruptcy laws.

And so 2011 draws to a close, with the death of what used to be America's largest company, and the continued faltering of the American economy, and soon, if drastic changes are not made, America itself. One can only hope that in 2012 the politicians who did this to our country- President Obama, Democrats in Congress, and big-government RINO Republicans in Congress- will be held accountable and thrown out on the streets and will be ruined, to join those companies and individuals who they ruined through their bad policy decisions over the past several years.

RIP General Motors Corporation, and RIP American capitalism.