Let's talk about that All-American passion: cars.

It's looking like the day is not too far off when we car-loving Americans could be driving cars made in Germany or France ... or even India. Who'd have thunk it?

In a less sickly economy, the Big Three automakers wouldn't matter as much as they do, either in jobs or in GDP. That's because, in a better-functioning economy, there would be alternatives.

There would be little upstart car makers producing cars that get 50 miles to the gallon, that burn anything you put in the fuel tank and burn it cleaner.

As matters stand, even if those little upstarts had gotten going, they would eventually have been acquired by the Big Three.

And the Big Three would then have changed the management and changed the designs and changed whatever else needed to be changed in order to turn those little upstarts and their cars into clones of themselves.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

The people on Capitol Hill, who would be inclined to celebrate all this market action, and many of the people who visit it to give lawmakers what they believe to be good reasons to celebrate it, know nothing about the market competition they all channel so lovingly. That is why the rest of us will soon be left without an American auto industry to replace the one currently dying in Detroit.

You have to wonder how long it will take for lawmakers to figure out that they're throwing good money after bad.

Or how long it will be before they get tired of being held hostage to rising unemployment rates — which, parenthetically, continue to rise in spite of more bailouts than you can shake a stick at.

We don't need politicians to generate or create the new economy for the new century.

We just need them to get the heck out of the way.