The error you make is in believing that all economics is zero sum. It is not. The total value available to be shared by all parties combined, changes with the soundness of the allocation of capital. Finance adds value precisely by directing capital to sounder allocations. This does not cost anyone anything; it makes de novo the new value gained by the shift. This is at bottom the origin of all entrepenurial gain. No, it is not "a free lunch" to believe in profit or entrepenurial gain.
When bank debt is going begging at 60-80 cents on the dollar to yield 10-15%, and you can sell your own debt for 100 cents on the dollar to yield 0-2%, and you go ahead and sell the second to buy the first, and the banks lent to do not fail, they you will make money and add value for everyone. That is what Buffett did in the crisis, for example. The treasury lent at 5 to 9% instead of 10-15, borrowing at the lowest possible cost to do so. That made the banks much more valuable, which benefited everyone.
It benefitted the treasury because they FDIC didn't have to pay out so much, and directly because the investments earned more than they cost to finance, and because the more profitable banks kept overall economic activity higher, resulting in more income and taxes from the banks, their employees, their clients, everyone really.
The treasury receives 35% of the profits of every corporation in America. The treasury receives about 20% of the income of every person in America, on average. It is not in its interest for all of them to do badly. It can't make itself richer by bankrupting all of its partners.
It was simply a smart trade. It paid for itself, both in direct accounting, and with indirect effects, many times over. Nor is this surprising - the men who directed it are competent professionals seeking a public good.
But there are men who think everything in life is adversarial, who think their hatred of whole classes of other men is a form of economy, who envy richer men than themselves and are horrified at the idea of the government helping them in any way. They see nothing wrong in the government taking $400 billion a year from the financial sector at gunpoint, in ordinary taxes, year in and year out. That they regard as their birthright. But let that sum be lent for one year at interest, and repaid with that interest, to those wealthy taxpayers, and lord how they howl.
They are merely disgusting. It is class war drivel, top to bottom.
Of course economics is not a zero sum game and of course properly functioning financial institutions increase the size of the pie. Zombie banks do not, and the government’s guarantees inevitably, if slowly, turn the useful financial intermediaries into parasites. Why should government supported banks be any better than government supported health care? Aren’t Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sufficient proof of the disaster of government involvement in the financial sector? A half a trillion likely down the rathole on that one, with nothing left but mansions and offshore accounts for the Demoncrat bureaucrats. It’s not just about the bankers.
If you really care about a Free Republic, you don’t go urging the government to make “smart trades”. The pages of history are littered with the tax-sucking holes that result from the government’s “smart trades”. They always look smart at first, and then turn into a rathole after the current crop of apparatchiks have skimmed off their pieces and gone away.