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Whether the company succeeds or fails, Bain will come out on top.

Exactly! That is their business model to come out on top. However, if they make a company more successful, the more they come out on top! Their business model is based on providing companies with an infusion of cash so they can survive and thrive.

They want the companies to succeed! The two recent examples that the left and certain unstable members of Freerepublic are screaming about failed because of a Union Strike theat caused the company to shutter its doors and a whole industry failing. Both events out of their hands.

If Bain had a choice they would have wanted these companies to succeed to collect more profits from their risky investment. They would be stupid to not take advantage of Government subsidies freely offered and not to demand a return on their extremely risky investment in failing companies. Does anyone sane person believe without demanding a return on their investment any venture capitalist would supply the needed capital needed to a dying company?

I believe that, properly speaking, venture capital is an investment in a promising -- but undercapitalized -- start-up. "Private equity" seems to be the preferred term for take-over of an underperforming company in hopes of turning it around or whatever. (I read that private equity used to be referred to as "private investment," but then you get the acronym of PIGs, so "private equity" became the preferred term.) Just because the news media don't know or care about the difference is no reason to emulate them.

I haven't seen any account of union strike company, so I have no comment on that. To what extent Bain may have failed in due diligence ahd so did not foresee union troubles or to what extent they merely overestimated their ability to deal with the union, I don't know.

So why was Bain making "extremely risky" (your term) investments only justified to them by the promise of gov't subsidies? The problem with government subsidies is that they tend to be ill-thought-out or precisely designed to reward the politically connected -- or both. Also, the gov't is playing (as usual) with other people's (i.e., taxpayers') money.

I don't think a tunnel-vision approach to making money at whatever cost to others (or to the economy or to the country for that matter) is a conservative value, else FR would be celebrating and praising George Soros, instead of condemning him.

If Bain had a choice they would have wanted these companies to succeed to collect more profits from their risky investment...Does anyone sane person believe without demanding a return on their investment any venture capitalist would supply the needed capital needed to a dying company?

Demanding a return is different than guaranteeing a return. People buy stocks all the time and they don't know whether they will lose or make money on the deal. It's called risk. It's called the free market. Rigging up your deals so that you will get bailed out by insurance, banks, the taxpayer or the workers' pension funds whether the company makes money or loses money or not isn't the free market, it's socialism and subsidization. If you want to make the argument that PE firms should be subsidized in this way because they are that important, then go ahead. But it doesn't show that Bain is an honorable business or one that succeeded on its own merits. It's essentially just another government-backed entity like Fannie or Freddie.