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I was trying to stay away from the financial/auto bailout–I really was. However, I just couldn’t resist any longer after seeing a friend of mine battle it out through Facebook comments with his high school teacher.  I hope that maybe I can convince just one more person out there that we have some issues in this country that need to be taken care of…

The graphic pretty much sums it up–American cars are inferior and because we won’t by them, the government stepped in to save the companies.  What right does the government have to give these failing companies MY money?  Who made the government an expert at running an auto company?  If a company fails to perform, it should go out of business, plain and simple.  If you (as an individual) are not good at something, do you just keep going on failing at it or do you try to find something else that perhaps you can do better?  I am terrible at designing an aesthetically pleasing website so I stay way from the aesthetics of web design at let someone else do that.  Rather, I will find something I am good at such as the mechanics and behind-the-scenes aspects of web sites.  Don’t give these companies money to keep doing something they suck at!  If another company can do it better, domestic OR foreign, then they should do it and we should free up our labor force to do something else that they can do better.

“In a truly free economy, profit and loss is a market’s objective measure of the value a business is creating in society” (Koch 102).

In other words, if your business is losing money it is because people do not see the value in what you do!

And another thing!  Although this post is about the auto bailout, why is it that these employees get so angry when they are asked to take a pay cut for a job where they are making twice what they should be in the first place.  Take a pay cut and keep making some money or don’t take a pay cut and lose your job as the company goes under.  You can’t keep asking for more money when the company is doing well but not go the opposite way when the company is doing poorly.  You can’t have it both ways!  I guess I shall return from this sidebar and get back to the point of this post, the bailout.  Time to switch gears from the auto industry to the financial sector.

Bailing out a failing company is just a bad idea.  Why incentivize bad behavior and poor decision making?  How about AIG.  Some AIG executives makes some really bad decisions and the company starts plummeting.  Uncle Sam steps in and tosses some cash their way to keep them afloat.  AIG accepts the money and proceeds to hand out huge bonuses to top executives.  Wait, what?  The very executives that drove the company into the ground are getting bonuses for doing so?  I think I’m going to open up a new business.  My only purpose would be to get hired into a company, run it into bankruptcy, collect a huge bonus, and dodge out of town.  But I digress… Because of this moronic spending, Uncle Sam stepped in and put a few criteria on the money AIG received (one criteria dealt with the handing out of these huge bonuses).  As a result, Robert Benmosche, C.E.O of AIG, threatened to quit and stated that he could not “retain top talent” if he did not have control over compensation.  Are you kidding me?  What “top talent?”  These people drove this company into the ground!  You have no “top talent!”  It boggles my mind to think that anyone believes their executives are “top talent” when they make such poor decisions that they can literally ruin an entire company.

This post has been more of an incoherent rant than I would have liked but this stuff just irritates me and I wanted to get my thoughts out there somewhere (you know, like a website that nobody will read).  This post won’t change anything and I realize that.  All I can hope is that someone will read this and at least start asking questions about how the government is spending tax dollars.

Koch, Charles. (2007). The Science of success. John Wiley & Sons Inc.