Who's in charge?

Evidently one of the people with the most influence over the fate of the U.S. auto industry is a 31 year old with no formal training as an economist. No, really:

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism. But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.

...Mr. Deese’s role is unusual for someone who is neither a formally trained economist nor a business school graduate, and who never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the future of the American and Japanese auto industries.

...Mr. Deese’s route to the auto table at the White House was anything but a straight line. He is the son of a political science professor at Boston College (his father) and an engineer who works in renewable energy (his mother). He grew up in the Boston suburb of Belmont and attended Middlebury College in Vermont. He went to Washington to work on aid issues and was quickly hired by Nancy Birdsall, a widely respected authority on the effectiveness of international aid and the founder of the Center for Global Development.

But he wanted to learn domestic issues as well, and soon ended up working as an assistant for Gene Sperling, who 17 years ago in the Clinton White House played a similar role as economic policy prodigy. Eventually, Mr. Deese headed to Yale for his law degree. But his e-mail box was constantly filled with messages from friends in Washington who were signing up to work for the Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigns. Mr. Deese chose Senator Clinton’s.

One of the virtues of a libertarian approach is that you implicitly concede that you aren't smart enough to run the world. You don't know how to run a car company and shouldn't be placed in that position.You don't know what type of cars they should be producing, what plants they should be closing, and don't present to have such knowledge. Your whole job as a public official is to figure out how to transfer more power to the private sector -- the people who actually know what they are doing -- to make such decisions.

The auto industry should be an open and shut case. GM and Chrysler can't pay their bills so they go to chapter 11 bankruptcy. From there on the court system handles their fate.The only role for the government is to ensure the rule of law.

Instead, those supposed experts in the White House, armed with impressive degrees and credentials, are dealing with forces they can't possibly understand and attempting to protect politically favored constituencies such as unions. This is not going to end well.

Update: Related thoughts from The Wall Street Journal.