The Government in Control of Private Billions

           

                         

The recent disclosure of the U.S. potential multi-billion dollar loss in General Motors ownership serves another lesson.

Did it also make sense to put the Executive Branch of the U.S. government in charge of $20 billion or more of BP’s funds, to hand out to victims of its oil drilling accident?

                           

Would it not have been far better for effected individuals to have gone directly to BP for compensation through independent intermediaries, supervised by courts?

                           

Without the politics involved? Without the federal government in the middle of what became an obviously unconstitutionally dubious form of meddling?

                           

This was just one of many instances of state capitalism that is a slippery slope best avoided.  (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at Twitter.)