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I agree with many of your historical points and share your concerns.
But with GM, there is a slightly different issue. Hypothetically, if the union made real concessions here, GM would not need the government: it could obtain a conventional loan. The only reason the government is involved at all is that no rational lender would lend money into this business model. It's axiomatic: if the government must be the lender, the deal must stink.
My personal hope is that the UAW will go back and get some more concessions, and then perhaps the government can bridge them over to the summer of 2009, when they can start selling cars again and get conventional financing. I don't want to see their assets sold to Honda and Toyota, where perhaps 60% of the work force would eventually be retained to work on a few carryover product lines at 75% of their wages. Better would be a wage cut now and retained American ownership of the assets.
I do disagree slightly that people like Charles Dickens or novels like The Jungle accurately captured everything having to do with the 19th century. It's almost impossible for us to imagine those times, in terms of daily existence, but if you study those authors and their contemporary reception, you see a lot of apparently decent criticism that some of those guys were pushing a very one sided picture. I read Bleak House, for example, after attending law school, and came away with the impression that Dickens did not know very much about the law; his satire had a "cheap seats," dim reflection feel to it, at least to my way of thinking - but you would never know that if you studied it as a literature student. Same with the Jungle. There's a lot of information on the Lake Michigan industrial immigrant experience which paints a very different, and much more pleasant, picture of the age.
