I have long thought that a good measure of a man is his willingness to admit his own ignorance. Since I come from a particular strain of Southern American male for which that is an exceedingly difficult task (we share genes with the Missouri mule), one of my rules of personal growth is to avoid forming opinions based on scant knowledge. Failure to follow this rule inevitably results in my inner mule turning the most weakly supported ideas into the most strongly held. Embarrassed pride ensues.

I found myself at just such a disadvantage recently on a cold, winter evening spent drinking a bottle of wine in a transmission shop. (How did I come to be partying at a transmission shop, you ask? Hey, I get around. I know people.) Anyway, a lively conversation with someone far more knowledgeable than myself in the financial realm devolved into a debate about the causes of the auto industry crisis. She blamed the United Auto Workers and held that the only solution was bankruptcy and breaking the union. I blamed corporate mismanagement/malfeasance for having not funded all along the pension obligations now breaking the backs of the American auto industry.

I support unions because I believe they are largely responsible for the existence of middle class America. Despite the numerous examples of corruption, greed and wretched excess found in many unions, and despite the fact that only about 8% of wage earners in the US are now unionized, I am certain this country is better off for having had them. And though my inner mule held it’s own in the conversation, I was acutely aware that I had very little factual data from which to draw in pursuing my line of reasoning. I was, as my father would have said, talking out my ass.

So it was off to the library, where literally the first book I saw on the New Books display was While America Aged by Roger Lowenstein. Talk about timely. The book is subtitled How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis. It’s good stuff. I’m only a third of the way through, but I’m going to go ahead and recommend it. I have finished reading the section on General Motors and was happy to see that my Cabernet-inspired argument in the tranny shop was really quite sound. As was my opponent’s. It turns out there have been plenty of bad decisions made on both sides of the auto industry bargaining table, going back more than fifty years. It is truly a sad history to look back upon. I’m now convinced that bankruptcy is the only viable option for GM, but breaking the union? Still not so much.