Yeah, that conservative talking point doesn't work either.
If the problem is that the companies are "too big," what are our options? We can't just let them fail, without causing massive collateral damage to the economy. What else can we do? Break up the companies? At what size? Based on the number of employees? The number of vendors? Annual revenues? Would anyone have suggested, prior to 2005, that GM was "too big?" Is Ford currently "too big?" How do we know which companies actually pose a threat, before it's too late? Who gets to choose which apparently healthy companies get sliced and diced?
Even if we could look into a crystal ball and resolve all these issues, we're back to your other talking point -- that of government "picking winners."
Another problem is that a constellation of smaller companies doesn't actually solve the issue; all it does is obscure it, and make it harder to fix the damage. For example, the S&L crisis of the 90s wasn't caused by the collapse of a single company, but by almost 750 companies doing the same things, and suffering the same types of collapses. Care to guess how much it cost the taxpayer to clean that one up? $341 billion in 1996 -- or $500 billion, in 2013 dollars.
TARP basically bailed out a relative handful of companies. Net cost to the taxpayer? $12 billion. And $10 billion of that was GM. So you tell me, which was a more effective bank bailout?
In addition, uttering a slogan doesn't change the fact that if GM and Chrysler didn't get a bailout, the US auto industry would've been totally ****ed.
