“If we the people are picking up the tab, we should insist on owning the banks.”
No we should let them fail.
Correct!
No More Bailouts!
Stupid people should be allowed to fail. That's the way it's been forever.
In hindsight, I think the biggest failing in 2008 was not allowing the banks to go down in flames, ala Lehman.
The bank frauds wanted to panic everyone that the world would end if they ended. But the Lehman case shows that the world kept spinning around the Sun without Lehman.
Would a bunch of large banks failing been disruptive? Yes.
Could we have gotten by? Yes.
The problem here is that the backstops and prop-up jobs don’t teach the bank frauds a lesson other than “crime pays.” They’ve learned that the party who likes to talk about a “free market” is just talking, and that the party who talks about being on the side of “the little guy” will very happily rob said “little guy” to hand anything found in the pockets or purses of “the little guy” over to the fat cats at the banks.
Amen.
Besides all of the right reasons, there needs to be the realization that government ownership does not mean "the people" own anything. Bloody Marxism is all that is.