When I finally did get a job, with The Economist, it paid about a third of what I'd been expecting as a consultant. I had about a thousand dollars in loan payments, and of course, I had to live in New York, where my job was. For the first time in my life, I understood what Victorian novelists meant when they described someone as "shabby". Over the years since I'd had a steady income, my clothes had stretched out of shape, ripped, become stained, gone out of style. I couldn't afford new ones. And I wasn't one of those whizzy heroines who can make over her own clothes. Instead, I frumped around in clothes that never looked quite right, and felt the way my clothes looked.

It took me a long, long time to crawl out of that hole. I'll never make what I expected to make as a consultant. I'll never have the job security that I had learned to expect in the pre-9/11 world. The universe will always seem a potentially malevolent place to me, ready to unleash some unknown disaster at any moment.

I was in a better position than auto workers in many ways; I didn't own a home in a dying area, or have children who needed to be educated. I'm not trying to claim that I managed to overcome with hard work and pluck, so why can't they? What to do with a fifty year old who pegged his future to a failing industry is a real question.

Nor do I think it's funny to see autoworkers who lived quite a bit better than most of America get their comeuppance. It really doesn't matter what you make; losing everything, most especially your dreams and your sense of security, is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. Laid-off consultants don't starve, of course, but neither will laid-off auto workers. They'll just be forced several rungs down the economic ladder. It will be humiliating, difficult, and it will sour a number of them permanently on life, and their country. If I could stop that from happening to people, without making some other aspect of life much worse, I would.

But whatever your feeling about government intervention in the economy, or the correct level of income inequality, I think there's one thing we can all agree on: for the world to get better, things that don't work have to fail. We cannot keep alive every company, every car and every job that someone once liked, because that way lies stagnation and death. Places where production decisions are made based on how much labor they can consume, rather than how much value they can produce, make everyone in society worse off in the long run.

So while I fully understand the human cost (I think), it has to be borne, for the same reason we couldn't save all the folks who loved their gentle home-weaving traditions, or their jobs making buggy whips. This is, of course, easy to say, when I am not bearing it. But I'm not against helping the auto workers transition to doing something else; I think unemployment assistance is a good idea, and should be extended during this crisis to at least 52 weeks. I would be fine with a job training program, if we could find one that works (so far, government training programs seem to run from useless to actively harmful). I'd be happy to take some of the money we aren't using bailing out auto companies, and offer relocation assistance to people who are trapped in factory towns.

I understand that this is not what the auto workers want; they want their jobs. But while I am happy to help the auto workers, I am not happy to help them manufacture undesireable cars at massive social cost. I too, would have liked to keep my job as a management consultant. But I didn't have a right to have the job I wanted merely because I liked it. And it wouldn't have been good for America if I had.

