"If they fold they'll just get replaced" sounds cute on cheap magazines, but that's not really how it'll work out in economic terms.
hrmm... true, but you have to understand the nature of ecenomics. its all trade, just because you dont sell a car for shit load of pizza doesnt mean thats what it equates to. you see REAL business, REAL trade(as in not a swindle) isnt gaining anything, its to trade something you have acess to, something you can produce for something you otherwise could not have for yourself. such as a farmer trading cotton for clothes. he may raise the stuff but there is no way he is going to make a decent shirt.
everyone has their niche, everyone has something they do well. as the global economy ballences it will start to be less centralized again. no one country is great at producing everything, places like japan, korea, china, india they all are good at certain things and they have formed their niche in the global economy. japan and the us are both high tech exporters, however often our products(save for playstation 3 and xbox) dont generally compete, often they compliment. korea has developed itself into an exellent explorter of things such as cars and it shows across asia and even here in the us. china, well we all know what china does right?
the problem is that gm, ford and all the rest of the american based auto giants just cant seem to do it as well as everyone else anymore. they aren't able to weave through the maze of taxes in the us and they aren't able to get fair deals from unions on laybor disputes. places like japan, germany, and korea are producing cars but they have the methodology to get it done better then the way we do it. as long as our industries stagnate like this they are doomed, its just the truth. our auto industry is being eliminated by competition, part of it is that our government is smothering our businesses with ever increasing socialist oversight and taxes but its a large number of other reasons.
now i say let the fucking shit collapse. with something as complex as the economy THE GOVERNMENT CANNOT FIX IT, save maybe by keeping its nose out of business for once(i know you guys are gonna state all this bullshit about the current banking crisis but thats only the largest symptom of a MUCH greater sickness).
in nature we have had massive extinctions several times. each time life flowed back across the earth with ever increesing ferocity and strength. it wiped the slate clean and allowed things to progress and grow again. this even happens in a smaller scale in many types of forests across the world, such as a pine forest which goes through cycles of "collapses" through beetles and fire about every 80 years so the new better developed generation can grow up.
the great depression caused a great many things, including possibly making what could have been a european war a global war. however it was not the end of all things, in many rights it was a time where people re thought business, and new roots were growing. with room for new things to move around it allowed a whole deal of growth, the only issue was that things did not return to their former levels until the 1950's.
me i'll go the long total fix route. i say let the fire spread and clense the obsolete, redundant and crumbleing. let a new system grow up and in 30-40 years time what wonders we will sew....
