The treasury was smart to prevent a messy default by AIG, since it would have cost the treasury far more than recapitalizing the company. Your one entry accounting fallacy pretends the treasury would have spent nothing if it had let AIG fail as messily as Lehman, but that is a pipe dream. Being against bailouts for 72 hours cost the authorities $2 trillion by the following Friday. Runs are much more expensive than anything "saved" by forcing debts to not be paid instead of seeing to it that they are paid.
Underlying your entire ideology is the notion that debtors have the right if not the duty to stiff they creditors, that creditors exist to be robbed blind, and that the height of policy is for the authorities to connive at robbing them as much as possible. Simultaneously you expect the treasury to milk financiers of hundreds of billions a year to pay for anything but support of finance.
This is stuff and nonsense, start to finish. The treasury is not a god above the fray but one modest player in the thick of it, and if it lets creditors get smashed, it gets stuck with every bill there is. You can't allocate debts beyond capitals economy wide, and you can't confiscate all financial capital either, since it performs an absolutely necessary social function that enforces its returns by natural economic law. All you can do is decide which hat you are wearing when you pay for the services of capital. And the longer you delay it and the more grudging it is, the more everyone pays.
Intelligent men at the treasury and Fed saw all of this, though not before screwing the pooch on Lehman in exactly the manner you are advocating, and seeing it blow up in their face immediately. They were pragmatic enough to reverse course when not paying $60 billion cost them $2 trillion within a week. Lacking all practical responsibilities, you pretend that you can oppose the costs as well, but it is poppycock. (If banks fail, the FDIC fails, then the treasury fails).
None of it had anything to do with GS or the interests of GS, it had to do with the US treasury and the interests of the US treasury. Which are not "pay out nothing", because it is already contractually obligated to pay for many things, and because wrecking the economy it owns 20% of is not a way to keep it afloat. The interests of the US treasury and of GS and other financiers simply happen to coincide, and you don't like it. Tough toenails.
None of it is your money anyway. Everything spent to support finance, directly or indirectly, since the country was founded, wouldn't make a dent in the vast sum milked from productive financiers by unproductive drones in Washington, year in and year out. But you never even acknowledge this. You treat it as a birthright - capital exists for you to rob.
Well, no, it doesn't, and it can and will defend itself against the depredations of organized deadbeats. Suck it up.
Incidentally, you are free to join them in all of this at any time, making any pretence than any of it oppresses you in the slightest utterly laughable.
Man, you just crossed into absurdity. I have promoted limited government my entire adult life. I am protesting how the likes of AIG and Lehman and Bear and GS messed up their risk assessment so badly that they required a massive bailout from the government and the Fed to prevent the entire financial system from imploding. YET YOU HAVE THE GALL TO DERIDE ME AS BEING IN FAVOR OF WASHINGTON PARASITES? The main private-sector parasites I see nowaday sare the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street who required billions from the goverment to keep from failing - because they failed to properly evaluate their risk - or simply didn't care because doing such would have limited their revenues.
You are a disgusting, two-faced [inserted appropriate expletetive here]. You have gone completely Orwellian in your attempts to defend the indefensible here. Capitialism is NOT screwing up things so badly that the government has to backstop $24 TRILLION in securities. Capitalism is instead not needing government aid in the first place - and acting prudently or else having the character to accept that the market will punish you for your mistakes. Character - something apparently completely lacking in your pathetic brain - only someone devoid of character can twist the clear meaning of concepts the way you have on this thread.