Quote:
Originally Posted by Pleasurepays
i think you are a very bright and obviously well spoken person who clearly puts a lot of thought into what he says. however, i think anyone can see the basic problems with the federal government taking over private enterprise as they relate to a free market system.
"a shit sandwich",, "no one will happy no matter what" etc etc etc does not mean its ok to stage a takeover of private industry, ignore shareholder rights, break contracts, have politicians dictate business strategy and product lines and so on.
you certainly have to see the problems with that, no matter how liberal you might be. there is a massive difference between a loan and running the company... and having the audacity to think that a bunch of politicians can run it better than actual business people.
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I think something that is being overlooked (at least as far as the GM deal goes) is that they asked for this. It wasn't like Obama took office and then facilitated a hostile takeover of GM. GM came to the government looking for help and the government told they would help them under certain circumstances. GM has a choice in this matter. They could have turned the government down and either just folded the company or entered a bankruptcy in hopes of salvaging it (but without a large influx of capitol this no way of knowing how successful that would have been) or they can accept the government money and the terms of that. I see it as no different than if a large investor agreed to dump a ton of money into the company to rescue it. That investor would demand on control of certain things and that is what happened here. GM was free to walk away before this whole thing started, but they chose not too.
One thing we can both agree on is that politicians are not the best people to be running any company. While there are some elected officials who have been successful in business on their own, many of them are really only good at getting elected and they know little or nothing about actually running a company. I agree with you that they should have brought in qualified people and let them run the show.