This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

What about Ford, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW, Kia, Nissan, and all the talk about rescuing GM and Chrysler

from a standard issue bankruptcy.

It may be easy to forget that the bulk of auto manufacturing in the United States is neither GM nor Chrysler.

Dan Eichinson, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, comments. Yeah, we hear from President Obama that he wants to take a hands-off approach and that this

is temporary and they're going to get in and out, but it's just absolutely impossible.

Not only implausible but impossible.

U.S. taxpayers have a 60% stake in GM right now.

The government has every incentive in the world now to show the

electorate that they didn't make a mistake and that the taxpayers are going to get a

return here. So that means policy is going to be invoked

that incentivizes consumers to purchase GM products instead of say Ford. I think

policies will be in place that hamstring the competition to GM,

that raise the costs of GM's competition, that subsidize the consumption of GM products.

And I think that bodes poorly for Ford, and regrettably,

at some point they might reach the conclusion that,

you know, we've been going alone,

we haven't asked for any money yet, but we're just not going to be able to continue to compete with a national Treasury that doesn't have any end to its spending.

This conversation didn't really get a lot of play. Even when the initial

round of auto bailout money went around, there was very little consideration for Ford or other auto manufacturers that produce cars in the United States.

It seems like the time at which the government was

about the time that Toyota and Ford should have been picking

...