The demise of Saturn was a surprise to me, though it shouldn’t have been one: the auto industry is at rock bottom, so finding investors to stake any venture in that sector is probably impossible. But, for the past 25 years Saturn represented something refreshing. (This recap in the Wall Street Journal is a nice obituary for a manufacturing “experiment.”) It was intended to be more customer-focused and more accessible than its Detroit cousins, and it succeeded, at least by comparison.

What sticks in my mind is not merely the loss of Saturn, but the loss of a great idea: Roger Penske’s notion of establishing a great, consumer-oriented auto retailer is so contrary to the prevailing manufacturing notions that it would have had a hard time no matter what challenges it faced at its founding. When all the competitors are aiming for big, over-engineered concepts, Penske’s idea was to go straight to the market with his products — and let buyers decide if the company was a success. He would have built on Saturn’s past reputation, but focused its energies on the retail effort. Staying market-oriented would have been a novelty in this era.

Today, industrial activity is over-saturated with notions of planning, of coordination, and of government partnership. Everyone seems fixed on the idea that U.S. manufacturing, and the economy generally, can be “guided” to recovery.

Personally, I think the Automotive Task Force, the federal rescues of Chrysler and GM, and more generally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the federal stimulus package), represent a reaction to the longstanding practice of Asian, European, and Latin American nations to partner with their manufacturing sectors, as well as China’s ongoing industrial build-up. Industrial and political interests in this country simply became exasperated with the “unfairness” of competing against all that, and decided that if they cannot beat them, we should join them. Economic panic created the opportunity to coordinate business and government to an unprecedented degree.

I don’t know if I’m right about the reasons: the result is the same.

But it will not matter either way: this country doesn’t have the right citizenry to participate in planning and execution on that scale. The dynamism of our domestic economy is in consumption: we need our millions of citizens buying and investing, and demanding results from the suppliers, in order to create profits and drive productivity. We can’t be guided to recovery, but we can grow to it, if the incentives are right.

The best incentive is revenue, which manufacturers earn by serving customers effectively. That’s why the Penske plan would have been such a refreshingly novel approach at this time. Its core concept was to deliver cars that buyers would want. How different that would be!