No where in this article does the writer lay any blame with Congress or the Bush administration for implementing this socialist bail out plan. If they had let AIG wither on the vine then the economy would have eliminated an inefficient group of people who would not be asking for more. This socialist thinking only creates more takers which cannot be sustained over the long term.
It's fine in the private sector, in theory. Take GM, if GM goes down, fine, we have twenty other firms that are or will take it's place in supplying customer needs and wants. Of course do to politics, GM, and Ford and the wealthy private profiteers of Chrysler, will become like AIG.
Anyways, back to large Organizations. They are like having all your chickens grown in one single fifty mile long coop. Something goes wrong, you get a disease, you are screwed.
It is better to have many approaches to production. There is no perfect approach, that works at all times, everywhere. With different approaches, if one is found at fault, you still have many others that can go forward and use the information of the single failure.
It is not that Bush/Paulson/GS et al are bad people. It is that they are invested in the very system, such as it is, that produced this mess, which is really a collapse of a belief system. The Gods of Directives, CDO and leveraged to the thousands cut have been exposed as a delusion. The struggle now is about who gets the clean up bill. So far it has been the taxpayer.
Once Paulson and Bush started down the road of bailing out banks and insurance companies, there could be no end to the bailout of almost any industry or government entity that exists and is in danger of going bankrupt. This probably will continue until the entire economy collapses. The seeds of this disaster was sown by both those in both parties for several decades. More of the keep interest rates low and pressure banks to loan monies to those who had no ability to pay back in order to buy votes. It was in some ways a easier method of vote buying than explicit government transfer payments though the politicians continued to use that as well.