This is not your money, Congressman [update 1]

Message to American car-makers, to would-be supporters of the car-makers, and to everyone that's standing behind the car-makers with their hands out waiting for some action as well: Bailouts are immoral. Bailouts are impractical. Let Ford fail -- and let all the rest of them as well. If their costs are too high and they're wasting resources on stuff that people don't want to buy, then let them go to the wall, and let those resources be put to better use.

And a message to the politicians: these aren't your billions of dollars. This is not your money. Yes, I'm talking to you, you immoral, thieving numb nut.

UPDATE: "There can surely have been few more pitiful spectacles in recent times than the heads of the Big Three American auto-makers going cap-in-hand to Washington to beg for taxpayer money," says Lindsay Perigo.

"The sight of these three supposed stalwarts of American capitalism pleading for politicians to rescue them from the workings of the marketplace with the plundered earnings of productive citizens must surely have Mikhail Gorbachev scratching his birthmark. Time was when such captains of industry wouldn't dream of bowing and scraping to the power-lusters and parasites on Capitol Hill. Now it seems their self-respect is non-existent as they shamelessly solicit coerced money with which to continue producing inferior cars and coddling the obscenely bloated United Auto Workers Union."