Really? How well was solyndra doing in the NYSE or NASDAQ?
Risk/valuation gets worked out through the the daily evaluations of millions of investors, and when publicly traded options aren't available, venture capitalists take a look and see if they want in. The government will never have the intelligence of private markets or investors with a stake in the game. Everything is affordable with someone else's money.
This is really the whole message of the collapse of the housing bubble as well. The "Quasi Government Enterprise" secondary mortgage market was essentially a government venture capital bank/brokerage for risky mortgages. It shouldn't even exist.
But sadly, if we didn't learn the lesson after nearly destroying our entire financial system and costing taxpayers trillions, we aren't going to.