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That you can be pragmatic, even if it requires pretty intense pressure. I agree with you that it would be unwise for the USG to allow the auto companies to fail.
On the other hand, I consider the current situation largely your fault, you and the rest of your regulation crazed cohorts. Why do I say that? One line: you're pissed off at the car companies for opposing CAFE. Let me explain something you clearly don't understand. Democracy isn't about being right; it's about what we all agree to. The American people didn't support CAFE. It may have passed the Congress and there was a lot of furor at the time to create CAFE but what did the American people do? As soon as Detroit began to exploit the necessary loophole in CAFE for trucks (hint: trucks aren't for moving people; they're for moving large heavy objects. I own a 3/4 ton Chevy van that gets about 17 mpg and mostly sits around waiting for the next time I need a truck.) the American people started buying the vehicles based on trucks like hotcakes. The SUV is a direct lineal descendant of CAFE; they really didn't exist before. So people are now driving around in vehicles capable of hauling 10 squares of roofing shingles and 4 rolls of roofing felt along with various other bits with a total weight of 16-1700 pounds. You aren't going to move that in a Mazda 6. My van moved that handily but I don't drive my family around in the van.
The role of any company, including the big 3, is to produce products that their customers want to buy. They were largely doing that. Oh, you can argue that they would have more market share if they'd ______ (fill in the blank - built more fuel efficient cars, cheaper cars, better quality cars, etc, etc, etc) but, in fact, they were making money building roomy, powerful vehicles that the public wanted. Then gas spiked at over $4 a gallon. And wonder of wonders! People started seeing these gas hogs as suboptimal. And therein lies the clue as to what should have been done instead of undemocratic and authoritarian regulation attempting to impose somebody else's vision on everybody - tax gas.
Not everybody is as cheap as I am. Back in 1972 when the price of gas was in the 40 - 50 cent range, I took a 1966 Volkswagen fastback which normally had an mpg range right around 25 and, with some special modifications and tweaking, got 48 mpg out of it. I was pleased. If the government set a target price for gas in, lets say, the $3.00 to $3.25 a gallon range and adjusted the actual tax based on the untaxed wholesale price of gas to achieve that range, I have a sneaking suspicion that even the profligate of the population would want fuel efficient vehicles. And Detroit would produce them. They would do so because they wanted to so that they could sell cars, not because some asshole in Washington told them to. There's a big difference there. There would be multiple benefits, not the least of which would be a stable price for gas that consumers could count on. And, it would work and work a lot better than Communist style diktats coming from Washington. Command economy style economics didn't work for Russia and it won't work well here either.
