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It must be like Christmas at the Wall Street Journal's editorial page offices today: Paul Gigot and his merry band managed to recruit Ion Mihai Pacepa, the "the highest ranking Soviet bloc official granted political asylum in the U.S.," to criticize the Obama administration's intervention into the auto-making industry. Just who is Pacepa? Why, he was the "car czar" under murderous Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu during the 1960s, tasked with stealing Western car designs and building them to meet the capricious autocrat's whim, which gives him no authority to criticize the White House's decision to invest in American car companies to prevent economic disaster. It seems someone may have pointed out that comparing an authoritarian country's centrally-managed economic policy 50 years ago to a democratic government making a loan to a troubled industry during a recession is a bit silly (and presumably requires Obama to be swanning around calling Chryslers "too luxurious for the idiots.") But they're always ready for that eventuality in the WSJ offices, and managed to come up with a Winston Churchill reference -- yes! Apparently Pacepa was given a Jaguar once by Ceausescu and didn't like it very much, and that's because socialist Clement Atlee nationalized the British auto industry after defeating Churchill, and it wasn't until Margaret Thatcher came to power that everything became OK again. Pacepa concludes thus:
I hope that the U.S. administration, Congress and the American voters will take a closer look at history and prevent our automotive industry from following down the Dacia, Oltcit or Jaguar path.I, for one, am extremely confident that the U.S. will not be following the economic policies of a Cold War-era dictator or of post-World War II British socialists. None of those cases is even vaguely comparable, in intent, context or mechanics, to the public-private partnerships developed by the current administration. The government has gone out of its way to make normative arguments against nationalization even as it is forced to pragmatically intervene in the sector. But the idea that the U.S. is even coming close to nationalizing the entire industry or even micromanaging the businesses of the automakers it has invested in is very far from the truth. But at least some lucky editor is popping a bottle of bubbly in the WSJ offices to celebrate a rare hat trick: Getting a Soviet defector to compare current U.S. policy to that of a brutal communist dictator while celebrating Churchill and Thatcher.
-- Tim Fernholz
