If the chief executives of the big three American car companies had more pride than good sense, they would have told Congress to stuff its bailout money. They would run their companies as long as they can, then shut them down and close the doors.

That would be an understandable reaction after members of Congress humiliated them when they went asking, in vain, for financial help.

“My fear is you’re going to take this money and continue the same stupid decisions you’ve made for 25 years.” Rep. Michael Capuano, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said that to their faces.

Stupid decisions?

The car companies by and large have made the cars their customers wanted. They didn’t make so-called gas guzzlers because they wanted to increase fuel consumption. They made those vehicles because Americans wanted and for a long time bought cars that are comfortable for long distances and big enough to be safe, hold a lot of stuff and tow a trailer with a boat.

Maybe it was stupid, in the eyes of members of Congress, of the car companies not to take long, crippling strikes but instead to agree to labor contracts that rewarded workers with decent wages and sufficient health and retirement benefits.

The car companies were probably stupid in maintaining their production plants in the United States. If they had shut those plants down, thrown hundreds of thousands of taxpayers out of work and built new plants in Mexico, as corporations they would have been better off. Maybe that’s what members of Congress believe.

Yes, maybe they should have tried harder to build all-electric cars even though they could not sell them. On the other hand, one all-electric model being built by a start-up company in California seats two people and costs more than $100,000 each. If Detroit had tried to sell such a car to a mass market, that would have been stupid indeed.

If members of Congress want to find people making stupid decisions, they might start looking in the mirror. How stupid is it to restrict oil production in a country that runs on oil? How stupid was it to set up and keep expanding entitlement programs — Medicare comes to mind — that threaten to bankrupt not just a few companies but the government of the United States? (hh)