Absolutely not. Why should taxpayers bail out a company that is actively putting people out of jobs?
The most rational economic system strikes again. The rich get richer. Everyone else gets fucked. Socialism for corporations, capitalism for the workers.
Edit: upon further thought, this has less in common with the bailout of the auto industry, and far more in common with the 2008 housing crash, and subsequent bailouts which went to the bankers, of course, while workers lost their homes in droves.
The meat of my point remains unchanged though. I just sometimes forget which once-in-a-lifetime economic collapse is which, side effect of being alive right now.
The parent is correct to identify that a lack of free market controls are what's destroying us here. You wouldn't have to pay out the nose like this if the fed didn't build and enforce monopolies for fun. But now we're here, after 20 years of Google's AdSense monopoly and Apple's App Store monopoly, throwing stones at OpenAI for ruining the fun.
Feels like we deserve this, everyone ignored the warning signs and pushed us way up the corporate escalation ladder.
It reminds me of 1990s Russia were the smart people didn't get caught up in capitalism casino and just kept tending their vegetable garden like they had done for centuries.
To quote Bob Dylan
"If you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose"
Ha. Most people didn't have any money to get into the crony/gangster capitalism. Just peasants with their vegetable gardens. How many American have vegetable gardens?
Is there a reason not to make the taxpayer (or government) the main shareholder after the bailout?
tHaT'S sOcIAlIsM
Though ironically for the first time ever, the people shouting that would actually be correct. Kind of.
If you mean in a broad "is this possible" sense though, sure, absolutely. Entities owned in part or in whole by the state are not uncommon, but anytime such things are proposed in the US, the right loses it's fucking mind.
Edit: hit the comment rate wall.
> I see! But still, I don't get in what sense it is more socialist that just having people actually buy the company to save it (instead of just saving it 'for free'). If anything it makes it more capitalist if the taxpayers invest in the bailout, instead of just giving it away!
Because socialism isn't an economic system in American politics, it's a scary word that the Russians and CHYNA are. It's also completely interoperable with communism because our conservative party here has long since abandoned anything resembling reality, and even when they were here with us, they didn't know the difference between the two.
Doing it this way is capitalist because it's American. Doing it the other way is evil because it's socialist/communist, like the Russians/Chinese/North Koreans do with the lot of this rhetoric absolutely drowning in racism and nationalism. Mind you, all those countries have issues, absolutely. I'm just saying a conservative with a gun to their head couldn't actually explain those issues, they're just evil because they're not American. [ insert eagle screech here ]
Honestly the best distillation is: It's Freedom when private citizens run things, and it's Communism when the government does. The fact that the government sometimes has to give rich private citizens a shit ton of money to keep things afloat is not reflected upon.
If you try and analyze it through a lens of what these words actually mean, yeah it makes no goddamn sense at all.
Except company A in this case is the government. No? Why is it that when it is the government doing this action, it has to gift the money instead of potentially profiting from it?
Edit : just saw the edit. I see! But still, I don't get in what sense it is more socialist, instead of just saving the companing 'for free', people actually buy (forcefully invest?) in the company to save it. If anything it makes it more capitalist if the taxpayers invest in the bailout, instead of just giving it away!
In other very capitalist economies governments did take stakes in banks in return for bailouts. The first British bank that needed one (Northern Rock) was entirely taken over by the government and shareholders just lost their money. The government bought stakes in others. It was still criticised as being too generous to shareholders and management.
The auto bailouts did not feature shareholders having money thrown at them and keeping their stakes (GM and Chrysler shareholders, for instance, were almost completely wiped out in the bailout, with the new GM owned by the UAW and the US and Canadian governments; the new Chrysler was majority owned by Fiat with minority stakes held by an autoworkers pension fund and the US and Canadian governments.)
Bank bailouts were more protective of shareholders because they were mostly government purchase of distressed assets or extensions of credit,