Maybe It's A Cronyist Republic??

There is so much talk out there about the "Big 3" bailout. I know the stated purpose is to advert disaster with over a million or so jobs lost. I don't understand how bankruptcy automatically means all is lost. Does anybody think that all the holdings of these companies is really just going to disappear, and that American cars will be no more? Wouldn't the "Moderately Sized 6-8" be better than the "Big 3"?
Look at the airline industry. Southwest is doing great, while United, Delta, Northwest all struggle. There is something to be said about a company that is "too big to fail".

Of course it doesn't matter what is the best course, or what "the people" want. According to George F. Will,

"...the socialism we do have is the surreptitious socialism of the strong, e.g.,
sugar producers represented by their Washington hirelings.”

ie the stronger the company the more political weight it has, and the more political weight it has the more money and favoritism it receives. Here is an example from Canada (Darin Morely via Coyote)

One of the great things about the web, obviously, is that it allows for much
more efficient communication that opens up new and useful offerings. For
example: the web offers the ability to find other people traveling to the same
general place you're heading and to set up a convenient carpool. It's good for
the environment. It's good for traffic. It just makes a lot of sense. Unless, of
course, you're a bus company and you're so afraid that people will use such a
system rather than paying to take the bus. That's what happened up in Ontario,
as earlier this year we wrote about a bus company that was trying to shut down
PickupPal, an online carpooling service, for being an unregulated
transportation company. TechCrunch points us to the news that the Ontario transportation
board has sided with the bus company and fined PickupPal. It's also
established a bunch of draconian rules that any user in Ontario must follow if
it uses the service -- including no crossing of municipal boundaries -- meaning
the service is only good within any particular city's limits.

The point of this is to show that this "share the wealth" idea sounds good for those without, but really who is getting the money? David Boaz at Cato:

it’s impossible to have nonpolitical allocation of trillions of dollars of
taxpayers’ money handed out by government. If you don’t want the powerful to
lobby and manipulate in order to get their share of the money, then leave it in
the marketplace. If you put it in the hands of politicians, expect political
allocation.

That is why government hate free market, and why socialism/rent-seeking policies and bureaucrats succeed, If you give money to big groups that in turn support you you win, if you support free enterprise and competition there is no big group to support you. And what is more important to a politician that re-election? (insert silence interrupted by the faint noise of cricket chirps)