There's not much I can disagree with in your post, TB, but I think you're missing the big picture. The issue isn't just the motor industry, it's every industry. Appliances, electronics, steel, industrial machinery, shoes, clothes, bicycles, toys, railroads, electronics, furniture, you name it. We don't make anything any more. All we do is services, marketing and finance, which are tertiary and quaternary economic functions that don't produce anything but provide exciting careers for a handful of drones. We are a nation of scribes, data entry clerks and real estate investment counselors. Everyone wants to work in the office.

There's plenty of blame to go around. And not just for consumers, but at every level of the hierarchy. People want easy jobs that pay well and don't require much knowledge. We want cheap, high-quality goods, and we want credit to buy those things we can't afford any more because we simply can't support this standard of living by selling each other pizza. And we want short term profits and screw the long term, because the watchword in business today is "what have you done for me lately?".

If you turn a laissez-faire economic philosophy loose in this environment it will inevitably give you what we have now. We can't earn enough at work to buy what we think we are entitled to, either at home or on Wall Street, so we borrow money and someone else makes it for us and our wealth bleeds out. Unlike the Depression, we just don't need to send the workers back to the factories, we no longer have factories. We no longer have idle skilled workers, we have no skilled workers. The American nation cannot make what it needs, and it can't afford to buy it abroad.

By letting the economic system, the business community, do what it wants, it followed the path of least resistance and maximized short term gains. And the countries that have been making a real long term profit off our savings, the Chinas and Koreas and all those little third world sweatshops that make our sneakers and lawn furniture, how do they do this? Why have they thrived? The answer is that they are managing their economies for the national interest, or at least trying to.

Their people are working to build up their economies at our expense. We did not have to do this, we already had most of the infrastructure required to conduct an industrial economy, we didn't have to build it up from scratch by working our people to the bone like they did. We could have had our cake and eaten it too. But we failed to maintain it and invest in it in order to hold our lead. It was not "cost-effective", so we sold the seed corn because there was good money in it.

To put it succintly, we had no economic policy like the rest of these countries do. We had a business community determined to maximize short term profits, we sold our competitors the technology they needed to compete with us and now we are buying back their improved versions of it with borrowed money. We let our executives and CEOs do what they wanted and not what we needed. They sold their country down the river for a few pieces of silver.