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Looking out for America -- Iacocca style
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Iacocca's 1984 autobiography.
While doing some fact checking for my last article, I came across a jarring, Iacocca-bashing column from 1990. It was from the National Review, and painted Lee as some kind of free-market obstructionist, a socialist, and a protectionist all at once. I found it hard to believe that a man that has done so much for America could be so vilified.
Then Iaccoca's first two books, the autobiography Iacocca, from 1984, and Talking Straight, his commentary on the state of American affairs, from 1988, came rushing back to me. The press has said all kinds of things about Chrysler's former chairman over the years. Once, they were beating the drum about how he smoked some inordinate number of cigars per day. The number was ten or more. Iacocca, by his own admission, conceded that three cigars was a big day for him.
But it went beyond cigars. The press also called him a protectionist. And then that led us into the sticky wicket of foreign affairs. In this case, it was American and Japanese relations. Lee simply wanted the Japanese to have to play by the same rules that we do if they were to sell products here. This, of course, most chiefly applied to cars, but had relevance with a litany of other products.
The Japanese auto manufacturers were (and still are) in the convenient position of being able to sell their cars in the largest and most profitable market in the world (ours) and take advantage of weighty parameters that apply to Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, but not to them. Never have the Japanese had legacy costs like Detroit has -- pensions, unions, special health care programs, and other allowances, but they've been allowed to run roughshod over the American economic landscape in the name of free markets. Never did the Japanese automakers invest in entire generations of American workers, build a middle class, transform the lexicon of possibilities for a brighter American future for decades on end. So it stands to reason that their costs would be lower. The Japanese did not enter the car business at a time when the labor abuses of the Industrial Revolution were still fresh in people's minds. So it makes sense that they would not have unions.
Iacocca wasn't trying to keep the Japanese automakers out -- he was trying to keep things fair. He argued that the United States needed an industrial policy to make sure that the Detroiters were allowed to succeed -- not to prop them up, as critics argued. Lee never sought charity. He sought fair play. Somehow, protectionism became a pejorative term. But in the ideal, it simply is a descriptor for ensuring that your own interests are represented (the Japanese hardly let us sell cars in their markets!). The Japanese automakers should never have had the advantage of competing in our markets without Detroit being on at least equal footing. The changes being made in the auto industry now should help take care of that, but it's something we needed to do back in the Eighties.
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