Batten down the hatches. The “social contract” argument is back.

In a widely-read Wall Street Journal essay last week, General Motors chief executive Rick Wagoner argued that his hard-pressed company isn’t seeking a bailout. It simply wants the chance to compete on a level playing field, he argued – before going on to ask for government relief from health care costs and a too strong dollar, among other things.

“Some argue that we have no one but ourselves to blame for our disproportionately high health care ‘legacy costs,'” wrote Wagoner. “That argument, while appealing to some, ignores the fact that American automakers and other traditional manufacturing companies created a social contract with the government and labor that raised America’s standard of living and provided much of the economic growth of the 20th century.” [Emphasis mine.]

It would be hard to pack more historical revisionism into a single sentence. For starters, it was the invention and mass production of the automobile itself – a result of entrepreneurial genius, hard work and a continental-scale market – that did so much to raise America’s standard of living. Wagoner also seems to forget that government spent a fair amount of the 20th century trying to use its powers to bust up General Motors, not help it be more profitable.

He also chooses to let pass the fact that it was Big Labor’s monopoly over the labor force, a tool handed to the unions by the social contractarians of the New Deal, that made it virtually impossible, once Europe and Asia had recovered from World War II, to get costs into line with new competitors.

The “social contract” theory stems from the writings of various 18th century philosophers, most prominently France’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that man willingly trades off some of his freedom in return for the protection of government. But as former President Gerald Ford is fond of pointing out, a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything you’ve got.

America’s Framers resisted the temptation to write social and economic goals into the Constitution, instead focusing on political process – unlike the French revolutionaries, who excited Utopian expectations that led straight to a Great Terror. And, as the Declaration of Independence pointed out, rights come from “Nature and Nature’s God,” not from the brows of mere politicians, much less auto executives and United Auto Workers officials.

Perhaps Wagoner was taking his lead from a recent New York Times article proclaiming the supposed death of the American Dream in Detroit. The writer, Danny Hakim, asserted “the auto industry was the pioneer in advancing what became of the American model for the social contract between workers and their employers.” He cited Henry Ford’s $5 a day base wage in 1914 as a prime example.

What’s often forgotten about Henry Ford’s $5 day, though, is that it came attached to a very extensive – and intrusive – social contract. In the same press conference, Henry Ford announced the formation of what came to be known as his Sociology Department, headed by an Episcopal churchman, who would use investigators to snoop into every aspect of the workers’ lives. After all, didn’t the company’s premium wages entitle it to make sure its workers would lead healthy, productive lives?

So detested was this venture into “scientific management” that it was cited by strikers 20 years later as a reason to unionize. But who will lead the fight to protect workers from the even more potent intrusions of a federal government waving its copy of the “social contract” as it barges through the front door?

Let’s call Wagoner’s talk about a social contract what it is: an unpersuasive effort to persuade taxpayers to bail his industry out of costs that are admittedly painful to confront – in large part because of the “social contracts” into which the country already has stumbled.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.