A reader dislikes my objection to the auto bailout:

I know there are a number of good philosophical and economic arguments that can be made against helping the Detroit automakers, and that is a debate America needs to engage in. Before you can have a debate that makes any sense, though, people need to know the facts, and I have seen so much misinformation lately in The Corner, and elsewhere, about the proposed bailout of the Detroit 3 that I have finally flipped and have to respond to someone. I guess you’re it, because you said: “the government will simply be subsidizing a regime that is institutionally incapable of making a car at a price anyone is prepared to pay for it.”
Here are the facts, as reported in the Detroit Free Press this morning: “General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC sold 8.5 million vehicles in the United States last year and millions more around the world. GM outsold Toyota by about 1.2 million vehicles in the United States last year and holds a U.S. lead over Toyota of about 560,000 so far this year. Globally, GM in 2007 remained the world’s largest automaker, selling 9,369,524 vehicles worldwide — about 3,000 more than Toyota.
“Ford outsold Honda by about 850,000 and Nissan by more than 1.3 million vehicles in the United States last year.
“Chrysler sold more vehicles here than Nissan and Hyundai combined in 2007 and so far this year.”
Apparently, Detroit is not “incapable of making a car at a price anyone is prepared to pay for it”, and the numbers bear that out. Detroit is not only selling cars, GM is outselling Toyota.

With respect, you’re missing the point. I wrote that Detroit is “incapable of making a car at a price anyone is prepared to pay for it” – that’s to say, the per-unit cost of manufacturing a vehicle at GM is more than the market will bear. See this handy pre-tax-profit-per-vehicle graph from Jim Manzi, which gets to the heart of the matter: It doesn’t really matter how many cars GM sell under the present arrangements, because those arrangements are unsustainable.

Detroit did this to itself. As has been remarked upon elsewhere, a great industrial powerhouse reduced itself to a basket-case wasteland within a generation due to a parochial stupidity that deemed what was happening in the rest of the world to be of no relevance.

And yes, for the record, I drive Chevys. Mainly because I’ve always thought there was something not quite right about tootling round New Hampshire in a Toyota pick-up. But, if it’s a choice between a private-sector foreign car or a state-funded American car, I’ll go private. Government automobiles are for the Soviet bloc.

[UPDATE: Several readers think the above post would be a lot shorter if I just recycled the old joke:

Sure, we lose a dollar on every one we sell, but we make it up on volume.]