What’s wrong with the government bailing out General Motors? David Harsanyi in The Federalist recounts just how hard the federal government came down on a competitor, Toyota, when it was briefly alleged that a defect was causing its cars to accelerate. Federal authorities later concluded that the problem was not the cars but, primarily, “pedal misapplication,” which means driver error. Harsanyi writes:

“(Attorney General) Eric Holder kept at it, though, and Toyota finally agreed to a $1.2 billion settlement (it has around $60 billion in reserves) to make it go away. Though it looks like the company doesn’t think the fight is worthwhile, for all I know it’s guilty. I’m certain, though, that General Motors is. It announced this week that it too was recalling over a million vehicles that had sudden loss of electric power steering. This, after recalling nearly 3 million vehicles for ignition-switch problems that the company knew about since 2001 and are now linked 13 deaths.

“GM has apologized. But does anyone believe the Obama administration took as hard a look at GM as it did Toyota? As early as 2007, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration knew that there may be problems with airbags but never launched a formal investigation. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s acting chief David Friedman testified that GM never told them that faulty switches were at the root of the airbag problem. Fine. Before plowing billions of tax dollars into saving the United Automobile Workers, did the Car Czar or any other Obama officials take extra care to review DOT records to insure that taxpayers would not be funding the preventable deaths of American citizens? Would DOT or Holder exhibit the same zealousness for safety when it came to GM as they did when it came to Toyota? In the midst of the bailout debate and subsequent ‘turnaround,’ news of a coverup and major recall would have been a political disaster.”

It’s one more reminder that a government that grows beyond any reasonable limit on its size or scope – so big that it’s sparing private companies from orderly reorganization through bankruptcy courts – is a dangerous thing. How hard will that government go after real safety problems with a car the president was praising in speeches?