Will a liberal freshman congressman from Colorado turn out to be the most eloquent opponent in the coming year of federal bailouts of failing corporations? Could be. Second District Rep. Jared Polis is off to a terrific start.

In a column Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, Polis advised politicians to admit when they are in over their heads, as in their attempts to save the Big Three automakers.

"Our United States Congress of lawyers, doctors, diplomats, retired military officers and career politicians," Polis wrote, "along with their staffs of intelligent young political science majors and MBAs, now finds itself poring over 'business plans' submitted this week by Ford, GM and Chrysler. People who have never before in their lives seen - no less implemented - a business plan are now trying to decide if these companies will succeed by means of a 'capital infusion' with various imposed preconditions and negotiate what we taxpayers (investors) should be getting for our money. Something is wrong with this picture."

Polis is being kind. Everything is wrong with this picture, as he deftly goes on to point out.

"Most members of Congress and staffers on the Hill are smart people," he acknowledged, "but we should not pretend that we are better at what are so clearly other people's jobs. One of the tremendously difficult tasks that we are ill-equipped to successfully orchestrate is restoring these three failing companies to health. As one of the members of Congress with a strong business background, I know what I don't know in business. While I hold my colleagues in great esteem, I doubt their abilities as turnaround artists are very much superior to mine."

If politicians are going to try to save the Big Three from bankruptcy - a fate that Polis seems to understand might not be the worst of all outcomes - they should do it by offering incentives to the private sector to come to the rescue, he says. "One way of doing that is to provide an exemption from capital-gains taxation on all debt or equity instruments used in the next six months to invest in the troubled automakers," he suggested.

A long shot? Of course, but it's still a good idea that at least wouldn't put taxpayers at risk.

More than a year ago, I suggested that Polis would prove to be a far more independent member of Congress than the Democratic front-runner at the time, former state Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald. But I hardly expected him to prove it before he'd even taken the oath of office.

More like 'fool-efficient'

The most important policy disputes in the next few years might not occur between liberals and conservatives so much as between liberals like Polis who know what they don't know and liberals who know everything - or at least act as if they do.

Consider the goal of getting Americans to buy more fuel-efficient cars. If you're the type of big-car hater who knows everything, then you'll probably appreciate The New York Times' stark approach to the issue: It proposes to outlaw large vehicles.

"Congress should require much tighter commitments on fuel economy" as a price for a bailout, the Times has declared. " . . . If the companies were willing to make smaller cars, they could achieve [a fleetwide average of] 50 mpg. Congress could consider demanding that Detroit simply phase out SUVs and vans by a certain date."

Simply phase them out! Have the editorial writers in Manhattan never met anyone who had a legitimate reason to own an SUV or van? Or is the problem that they can't imagine that a consumer's freedom of choice might ever trump their fixation on fuel economy?

The more pragmatic, less bossy writers at The Washington Post propose a different path toward fuel economy: a consumption tax. "Congress should enact a steep, inflation-indexed hike in gas taxes, one big enough to alter consumer incentives and habits permanently. . . . The increase could be rebated through the income tax system."

The Post's solution is less disruptive and less coercive, and more respectful of the chance that the writers' priorities might be wrong. By contrast, folks who know everything never entertain that possibility.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.