Every good brainwashed American knows that the government couldn’t run a two-car funeral. Only the cleansing, invigorating winds of free competition can bring efficiency to large organizations. Without that what have you got?

The DMV, that’s what. Overpaid, lazy, surly bureaucrats. Poor service, long lines, arrogant indifference, cronyism. Yatata, yatata. You know the drill, because you’ve heard it all your life from the corporate community and its fully-owned subsidiary, the Republican Party.

Now think back over all the times in your own life that you’ve been scorned, cheated, ignored, defrauded, neglected and otherwise screwed over by giant, faceless, impersonal, uncaring bureaucracies. Was it the Post Office? Was it the Social Security Administration? Was it Medicare?

Or weren’t your most maddening experiences of all, now that you think about it, those losing battles with the power company, the cable company, the phone company, the insurance company, and the credit card company?

If so, you shouldn’t be surprised to read this:

As Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation explains in the new issue of the Washington Monthly, there is a bright shining example from not so long ago of government bureaucrats engineering the revival of an industry easily as troubled as today’s automakers and, if anything, more central to the economy.

In 1976 Washington took over Penn Central and five other bankrupt railroads and folded them into a government-sponsored entity, Conrail. New management was recruited, federal dollars pumped in, major structural reforms instituted. A decade later, a thriving Conrail was sold off in what was, at the time, the largest IPO in U.S. history. A fluke? Hardly. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson put the entire railroad industry under government control, and later placed it back in private hands in much better shape than when he got it.

While the parallels with yesterday’s railroads and today’s auto industry are not exact, they are close enough to provide many useful lessons. The most important is this: as the automakers return to Washington for a second round of assistance, the greatest danger may well be not that government will intervene too much, but that it won’t intervene enough.