In the early 1960s, when consumers first started buying more fuel-efficient foreign cars and when smog-shrouded American cities started demanding that something had to be done about automobile emissions, Detroit automakers resisted government regulations for cleaner, high mileage cars. The reasons given were the usual, "it would be too expensive", "we would lose our competitive edge", or, my favorite, "it was an unwarranted intrusion into our constitutional rights and freedoms". Have you noticed how every time the Young Republicans slip their hand in your pocket they first distract you by waving a flag in your face?

It would seem that making smaller cars that required less fuel could go a long way to simultaneously solving both of these problem, (not to mention a host of others, like endless Middle East wars) and indeed, that is exactly what Volkswagen and other foreign car makers were doing, and quite profitably as well, thank you.

But the American auto industry lobbied instead for expensive pollution control devices of dubious effectiveness retrofitted to their existing fuel hogs. Even the pioneering VW beetle was banned because its air-cooled 1200cc engine was too "dirty". Instead, the industry and its lobbyists foisted catalytically converted 4 and 5 liter muscle cars (and the marketing program to convince the adolescent American penis it couldn't get laid without one) on us. They told us it was too expensive to retool the plants to build cleaner, more efficient engines and to market them to American consumers, and they knew the little foreign engines could not handle the additional load of catalytic converters and other technological stopgaps. Our big cars could easily absorb the loss of fuel efficiency and power due to pollution controls without notice, while the Big Three's market competitiveness would not be affected by a technical add-on all three had to adopt simultaneously, by law. Heaven forbid they might actually have to compete. They could continue to sell luxury, size, power and styling--everything except quality.

Meanwhile, the foreign automakers, particularly the Japanese, went back to the drawing board and started designing small, efficient vehicles that could meet the challenge of the new American market regulations with more-than-acceptable performance and styling, and making them more cost-effective and reliable than the Belchfires and Behemoths coming out of the Motor City. The American auto industry never could meet that challenge, and never fully recovered.

It was a success story for the Free Market, but not for American Capitalism. Our businesses, and especially our businessmen, were just too lazy, greedy, stupid--and corrupt.