Economics: Buyout: Auto-parts company Lear Corp bawt by Icahn for some 5.3 billion (WSJ) but another source says 2.8 billion (NYT)

A new blog, Securities Law Prof Blog carries a brief unsigned item Lear Shareholders Disappointed with Icahn Bid. Wall Street Journal firt quoted $2.8B, while New York Times cut the figure down to $2,8B. It turns out that an Icahn corporation is assuming a huge debt responsiblity in addition to the lower figure just mentioned.

In any case, some shareholders were furious that the Lear board sold out their investments (saying that $36 a share should have been $60 a share), but it was unclear for what reason that downplay would occur by the Lear board--except possibly the salient fact that there were no other offers. No interest. And why that? Auto-parts companies are losing orders, especially from the Big Three homegrown auto companies, with Daimler-Chrysler the latest to announce huge cuts in its workfroce.

Will someone give Carl Icahn some competition for his bid to acquire Lear, the auto parts supplier? Some major shareholders hope so and express disappointment with the board for agreeing to Icahn's $36 bid. Wall Street, however, is doubtful anyone else will be interested. See WSJ, "Lear Holders Call for New Bids" and NYT, "Lear Agrees to Buyout Offer of $2.8 Billion From Icahn ."

All this billionairism at the h+est American level of coprorate economics points to a whole series of major adjustments that will ripple out fron the crisis in the auto industry, first as it spreads to the auto-parts industry and then to other industries. Layoffs will put more thousands of industrial workers on the streets and at the welfare offices. Families will suffer.

USA > Economy & Clean Air,

But these trends could be avoided by a shift to a command-economy by govt in close consultation and scheduling of change in conjunction with a tripartite forum of govt, business, and labour in the affected industries--whereby the homegrowns are forced to shift over to electyrically-rechargeable plugin hybrids and thus reduce pollution by shifting to a new kind of car (trucks, plaines, skidoos, lawnmowers, etc) that like the new fuelcell in General Motors' concept car the Chevrolet Volt could keep workers employed in non-polluting manufacture, deliverty to distributors, salespeople, etc. This would mean that Prez Bush's call for alternative fuels and teaching-point "America is addicted to oil," could be given teeth. Does this violate some sancrosant absolute principle of "the limits of government"? I think not, despite a text of Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd that on first read seems in one 1946 essay, according to Gregory Baus on Thinknet seems to imply so.

Dooyeweerd writes in his 1946 essay The relation of the individual and community from a legal philosophical perspective: "...the State is characterized as a public legal community of government and subjects... the State cannot assume an absolute sovereignty over the other societal spheres that differ in principle from the State. Every form of legal power, that of the State also, is structurally delimited by the inner nature of the sphere of life within which it is exercised... As soon as one ascribes an absolute sovereignty to the State, one has abandoned the boundaries of law and collapses into State absolutism, based upon a deification of the State. Then also the idea of the "public interest" [or, common good] degenerates into a lever for an unhampered Sate absolutism... The ius publicum, constitutive of the internal law of the State as a public legal institution does not permit service to group interests external to the (public) jural qualifying function of the State. Therefore, the nature of the State is irreconcilable with the allocation of privileges to specific persons or groups [eg, economically impoverished persons--is this bracketed material Dooyeweerd or Baus's reading / interpretation / distoration ? of the phllosophere] ... It is only the State, on the basis of its public legal power, that can... guarantee against an overexertion of the public legal power itself, as long as the public office bearers keep alive an awareness of the inner limits of their competence. The State, in view of the inner nature of the ius publicum, does not have the competence to bind the exercise of civil private rights to a specific social-economic destination, simply because the ius publicum intrinsically lacks any specific economic qualification... [There is an] undermining influence that the idea of "social rights," in its overextension, exerts on civil private law."

But our problem is not covered here: how far can the state go in calling to account companies who destroy the Clean Air that the entire soceital membership needs to breathe properly? Does the power of the state's sword extend to correcting the excesses of runaway corporations, while the state makes these corprorations continue (altered) production, maintain employment of workers, and provide new products (healthier cars), while making illegal gradually the use of the older polluting product which is damaging the ablity to breathe of many people in the society and exaggerating the health and medical expenses to boot.