The Transportation Department demanded documents related to Toyota's massive recalls in the United States on Tuesday to find out if the automaker acted swiftly enough. Toyota, meanwhile, said it will idle production temporarily at Texas and Kentucky plants over concerns the recalls could lead to big stockpiles of unsold vehicles.
Atlas Shrugged is by no means an upstanding work of literature, but it is certainly an insightful one. One of the central issues of the plot involves an American government punishing successful companies by handicapping them against other companies (to make it "fair"), and enforcing industry-wide socialist subsidies to "promote" business. The result, of course, is that the successful companies are slowly and inexorably driven into the ground, trying to drag the burden of a massively unproductive sector with them. Ultimately the economy goes into an endless depression, with no real producers left.
While Toyota may not have acted as promptly as they should for the recall, one strongly suspects that the trouble they are in is not at all due to their procedure for the recall, and very much due to their success at the expense of American car companies. Toyota rose to the top by the choices of the consumer; now it appears suspiciously like the government is attempting to knock them down a peg to support our own failing domestic industry. And that failure is due to very specific, preventable problems. Yet what we see is nothing like an attempt to solve those problems, but instead an attempt to tear down their opponents, to "level the playing field".
The similarity to the situation described in Atlas Shrugged is troubling, to say the least.
Yet what we see here par for the course lately. Our government is actively engaged in propping up failed enterprises with good money. If not stopped, this can do nothing other than utterly erode our economic foundations and ultimately lead to the collapse of our currency, economy, and national stability.
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