The country's in the very best of hands Tom Smith

NY Times headline:   "The 31 year old in charge of dismantling G.M."  I think it's wonderful how government provides unique opportunities to bright young people.  If Mr. Whatshisname had decided to go to an investment bank or law firm, he would not be in charge of the reorganization of a giant American industry with many billions of dollars and thousands of jobs at stake.  He would not have hade such a responsibility for decades, if ever.  And yet, for all we know, he may do a very good job.  You never know until you try.  And if it's a big disaster, you can always say it would have been worse had they done anything else.  This is why I tell young people if they want to try their hand at exercising lots of power in areas they don't really know that much about, Washington is the place to go.  You don't get paid that much, but your leverage over tons of other people's money can be enormous.  I do think when he returns to Yale Law School, assuming he does, he really ought to be able to get credit for reorganizing the U.S. auto industry.  I'm sure he'll learn at least as much as he would have in a 4 hour bankruptcy course.

Comments

[krome]

The problem with letting children run things is they have little breadth of experience. This doesn't bode well.

[Randy]

This actually puts into positive relief the youth that Bush installed in Iraq (remember the twenty something - a Yale College grad - that was supposed to get Baghdad's stock exchange running again). In a law firm, he would just be preparing closing checklists and drafting corporate resolutions to be marked up by a senior associate.

[Button]

This is an embarrassment for the nation.

[Matt]

He seems nice enough. I figure that the baby boomers have screwed this country up bad enough, maybe it is time they step aside and let the younger folk get a shot at running the place.

[Bryan]

Absolutely Matt. The public should know that the younger generations are just as incompetent as the older ones.

[Matt Lister]

I guess they already tried the former head of the Arabian horse breading association and found he was busy or something.

[Larry]

"I'm sure he'll learn at least as much as he would have in a 4 hour bankruptcy course."

This is exactly right. I thought I learned quite a bit about bankruptcy law when I took that course in law school (although it was two decades ago). When pundits began discussing the possibility that Chrysler might file Chapter 11, I doubted Obama would let this happen because he wouldn't want his UAW supporters to have their wages, benefits, and pensions cut. Bankruptcy law, at least the way I had learned it, was firm on paying out creditors according to a set of well-established rules, and the secured and other priority creditors are above unsecured ones, which included the UAW workers.

But when it became clear Obama was willing to let Chrysler go into bankruptcy, I figured Obama thought he would be able to put the fix in to favor the UAW and screw the secured creditors. I didn't know how this would be accomplished, but I didn't think he would just let the UAW be dealt with according to the well-established rules of bankruptcy law. My guess was that he would just lean on the bankruptcy judge to ratify the deal he had arranged.

The reality was a bit more complicated than that. I didn't know about §363 sales. I guess this shows how the "rule of law" can get bent. And if it happens once, it'll happen again. That's one of the ways countries become banana republics.