(I meant to post this a few weeks ago, but it some ways it's even more timely now.)
Bill Saporito muses in Time Magazineon How We Became the United States of France, and observes:
GM and Ford need money to develop greener cars that can compete with Toyota and Honda. And they're looking to Uncle Sam for investment — an investment that could have been avoided had Washington imposed more stringent mileage standards years earlier. But we don't want to interfere with market forces like the French do — until we do.