TARPed and Feathered

Well, I just read that there is a move afoot to eliminate the use of corporate aircraft headed up by Barney Frank (which brings to mind another Barney from awhile back, Barney Fife. For those too young to have seen him, this Barney was an incompetent but lovable deputy on Mayberry RFD who was so bad, that although he was allowed to carry a gun, he was not allowed to have it loaded and could only carry one bullet at a time. Said bullet he kept safely in his buttoned shirt pocket until the time of dire need. When he did decide to use it he ended up shooting his foot, the sheriff’s hat, a nearby flowerpot or any and everything else except the intended target. Kind of like when our modern day Barney tried to help out low income renters buy homes by forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to give out loans to people who previously were not qualified for them, assuming that magically the basic laws of finance would somehow be shot dead. That is one bullet I am sure we all wish Barney would have left safely buttoned away in his shirt pocket). Anyway, as I was saying, some fools gave Barney a new bullet and he has now decided it is time to blow away corporate use of General Aviation aircraft. This got me to doing a little mental experiment. All the companies that will be getting TARP funds were (and presumably still are) incompetent in one form or another. They were either naïve, stupid, greedy, unaware, lazy or what have you, but for the ease of the experiment let’s just call it incompetent. Also, let’s ignore the positive effects for these companies that throwing hundreds of billions of hard earned taxpayer dollars at their feet will have (that is the great thing about mental experiments, you get to really simplify). In this experiment we have some possible scenarios. First, Barney stopping their use of these aircraft saves them money and thereby makes them more efficient or effective and they recover nicely. But I was thinking, since they are already known to be incompetent since they will be getting TARP money, forcing them to stop using airplanes may make them survive longer because it will let them be less effective in their incompetence. Instead of going and fouling up three sites in one day it will now take them all week to spread their damage to those three sites. It just may help. When I first saw the outrage of the Detroit Three using jets to get to the bailout hearings, as a shareholder I was outraged at the outrage! I want the people of companies I own a part of to be as effective as possible and use whatever tools they can to make them so. I would not tell a one of them that they can’t use a cell phone or a Blackberry because I don’t like them or because they cost too much or because I don’t get to use one (which by the way brings up: is Barney going to tell Nancy Pelosi to stop flying the taxpayer provided Gulfstream V between San Francisco and Washington DC? Might be a good idea!). Anyway again, I then thought back on the actual performance of the Detroit Three in the hearings, where they couldn’t form a coherent sentence and did not know even the most basic numbers behind their businesses and I thought “Gad! Not only do I not want them using jets to be more effective, they were so bad that they shouldn’t have even been allowed to drive back to Washington for the second round, they should have been forced to walk”. That would have kept them out of the office for a long time and, while decreasing their ability to do more damage, may have even allowed some competence to sneak into their companies while they weren’t around and start fixing things instead of going yet again to Washington asking for a handout or a tariff or a new law to save them from their own bad performance yet again.
Of course the real outcome will most likely be that the companies not asking for TARP money will continue to make appropriate use of corporate aircraft, thereby further increasing their effectiveness and further increasing their lead over the incompetent, TARPed and now walking competition. Oh well, survival of the fittest I suppose.

By the way, one thing I am not discussing here is the 1.2 million people employed in the General Aviation industry nor the $150 Billion per year of business they do. It does make me want to go check to see if Barney was involved in the very Barney-like attempt awhile back where some Washington bone-head decided those fat cats in their yachts needed to be punished for being so successful so they tacked a 10% surcharge on the sale of all new Yachts. Almost overnight the Yacht business stopped and about 150,000 people were forced out of work, costing far more in unemployment compensation than ever was planned to have been collected in the surcharge taxes, not to mention throwing an entire industry into a turmoil that took it years to recover from. Sure sounds like something a Barney would do. Heh people, let’s stop giving them new bullets!