Well, that’s what The Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson said. He didn’t say that word for word, but he might as well have. This is what he wrote:
Despite the popular belief, lemmings don’t really hurl themselves off cliffs to reduce their numbers. That sort of behavior is seen only among Republicans in the Senate, who gave us a demonstration when they torpedoed legislation to bail out the auto industry.
…
It may be that General Motors, Chrysler and Ford are lumbering, Jurassic beasts that deserve their looming extinction. But only a free-market fundamentalist, a lunatic or a Senate Republican — perhaps that’s redundant — would conclude that now is the moment to hasten Detroit’s demise.
Got that? Anyone who believes that Chapter 11 is a better way for General Motors and Chrysler to restructure for the long term, rather than a congressional run bailout, is a “lunatic,” according to Eugene Robinson. So just off the top of our heads, here is a small list of people Robinson has labeled lunatics:
- John Bates Clark Medal winner and Columbia University economics professor Joseph Stiglitz
- Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig
- John Bates Clark Medal winner and Nobel laureate Gary Becker
Click through the above links to read each of these academics’ cases against a bailout and for bankruptcy. Note that unlike Eugene Robinson, who had no formal education in economics or bankruptcy law, each of these men manages to make their case without calling anyone crazy.
