What's Good for GM is Good for America- and What's Good for GM is Bankruptcy

What's good for GM is good for America and right now bankruptcy is good for GM.  As this article in the New York Times demonstrates, bond holders have decided not to be rolled and are willing, or a significant subset are willing, to send GM into bankruptcy.  Other reports have the U.S. Government poised to become a 70% shareholder of the country's largest automaker.  There was no good reason for taxpayers to get involved in GM's future and there is less now.  GM has no problems that a good bankruptcy could not solve at far lower cost to an overextended taxpayer.  GM has some cars that are the best they have ever produced.  Further, they still have a large share of the largest car market in the world.  What is needed is to lower the fixed costs that have made GM unprofitable.  GM, both its management and its unions, has operated as if 1966 would last forever.  In bankruptcy, the secured creditors and bondholders have a better position than the shareholders and "stakeholders", primarily unions.  That is probably why the Democrats have not wanted an orderly bankruptcy proceeding.  By voiding current contracts, wiping out large debts and obligations and marshaling the assets of the company a new, smaller, profitable company could return.  A choice has to be made however. Is the business of GM selling cars profitably, or to provide jobs at above market cost?  A government owned and approved GM will not fight expensive mandates on its products now brewing in the Congress and at the agencies. It will not force reality on union workers who are living in a time that is gone.  It can only do this by draining funds from profitable sectors of the economy or adding debt to the government's balance sheet.  For Republicans, an orderly bankruptcy of GM must be the party position.  It will allow a profitable, unsubsidized company to come back, or at least its assets to be used by a profitmaking company.  It will deny the President and the Democrats another asset.  It will highlight the party's position as the only defender of the rule of law and property rights, and it will distance Republicans from the under the table deals likely, no, certain to go on in a federally operated and owned GM.  Free markets are not just about success stories. They are about failing and the seeds of success that can come out of such failures but can never come out of endless subsidies that allow dysfunctional companies to limp along as a burden rather than meet the future under their own steam.