My Debt Quest

I am really getting tired of hearing about the big bonuses being paid out to top executives of so many companies when they are actively laying off the labor. It is the company's perogative to run their operation - we are, after all, a capitalist nation where the best business model has the opportunity to succeed in a competitive market. Government has no business getting involved in the operations of any private corporation, and regulation should be limited to the safety and health of the workforce and the consumer. What happens, though, when the government has funded those operations? Now that the government is bailing out so many of these companies, have we crossed a line? Are we chipping away at the foundations of capitalism?

In my perfect world, all of the companies that made operations decisions that proved disasterous should be left to flounder. After all, if I started my own small company and targeted the wrong market or took on too many bad debts, what happens? I go out of business.

I am a firm believer in the principles that Charles Darwin published so many years ago -- his "survival of the fittest" theory is the basis of evolution. If an animal is poorly adapted to its environment, let's say a lizard that is flourescent orange instead of a neutral earth color, it gets killed quickly and does not have the opportunity to reproduce. The neutral earth colored lizard, on the other hand, produces many offspring and continues that genetic phenotype. If the government takes the flourescent orange lizard and bails it out with a safe shelter, they artifically continue the poorly adapted traits and are then stuck with an entire population of orange lizards. Who, then, gets to continue supporting the orange lizards after the initial bailout?

The dilemma now is whether we can let the big companies fail, recognizing the magnitude of the impact on society as a whole -- the number of people directly impacted through unemployment, the number of other businesses that are in the supply chain, and the global economic impact of an investment bank failing. Obviously, the government has decided that they can't let the companies fail, but we are giving the bailout money to the same executives who already mismanaged their companies into their present precarious positions. Those same companies who were in such dire financial straits as to require government bailouts somehow still have enough revenue to justify paying out bonuses to their top executives as they fly about the country in their private jets.

I'll climb down off my soapbox now.