I’m responding to a comment that was generally in agreement with Tom Friedman’s column of 11 November 2008 about what to do about the automakers, but also frightened of the implications their failure will have on the economy, especially here in southeast Michigan:

I know, it’s a tough one. I feel sorry for all the employees (and retirees) who are being screwed, but on the other hand, if the market isn’t allowed to punish the shareholders (who will in turn punish the management), nothing will ever improve.

I also think that ultimately education is going to have to improved because there is no future for manufacturing in the US; Americans will do R&D, manufacturing will happen overseas. We just need more Americans capable of doing “brain work”.

My brilliant plan (just thought up while typing this): the government acquires the assets of the automakers for pennies on the dollar and auctions them off to the highest bidder (i.e. Toyota, Honda, and defense contractors (the only manufacturing that should stay domestic)).

With the capital raised by the sale, put some into health care, but most of it should go into alternative energy research and training. The white-collar auto workers can be trained to do engineering, etc., and the blue-collar workers can handle the massive deployment of new energy technologies.

(While they’re waiting for the research and engineering to happen, they can fix what President Elect Obama(!) has been calling our “crumbling infrastructure”. The Eisenhower Interstate System was designed to last 50 years^{[citation needed]}. Time’s up.)

A very cool example of this is The Huffington Post‘s Fundrace, which is a Google map of the United States with public political donation information on it. The points are color-coded by party or candidate, and the size of the dot corresponds to the amount given by that individual. That’s right: individual. You can zoom all the way down to individual people or households. It’s kinda creepy, I’m not gonna lie, but it is a good thing that campaign donations are all public information.