For decades, the domestic auto industry has been in a self-inflicted death spiral. It’s made bad deals with unions, agreed to overly generous pension and health care plans for both employees and retirees, and it’s (perhaps most critically) lagged far behind foreign manufacturers in both innovation and management practices.

While elements of the Wall Street bailout bother me, Wall Street is not a failing industry. It got into some risky practices that it didn’t understand — a lot of them — but I have no doubt that capitalism isn’t failing.

But I can’t figure out how there would be a long-term negative impact if GM, Chrysler and Ford all went belly-up. Or got bought in pieces/parts by foreign manufacturers. Short-term hell? Absolutely. Even if they were purchased, not closed, there’d be a lot of upheaval nationwide — everyone knows someone who works in a business related to the domestic auto industry. My half-informed suspicion is that part of the problem in the industry is simply bloat — not working as efficiently as it should. But, despite our energy idiocy, I don’t think the domestic demand for cars is just going away. So someone will need to make them. We’ll need more from Toyota and Nissan if Ford dies. It will still make sense to build a lot of those cars here, no matter who owns the means of production.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend a couple of years ago. I said, I don’t get agricultural subsidies. It can’t make economic sense to produce corn or cotton or any number of other things here, unless you’re doing it on a massive agribusiness scale. Why should we keep spending tax dollars on subsidizing farmers? He argued that, while the subsidy programs might be larger than needed, part of it was based on a historical sense of national security — that subsidies had gained a real foothold during World War II, to ensure we produced enough cotton for the military’s needs. But we’re exporting about half the cotton we produce today, so the level of the subsidy doesn’t necessarily make sense to me anymore.

So, I would potentially buy it if you said there’s a national security element to ensuring the survival of some of the domestic auto industry. But I don’t see why we should throw money at an industry that hasn’t figured out how to manage itself. Please help me see.