Throwing Bad Money After Bad
The automakers are back -- already -- with their hands out. Surprised? Thomas L. Friedman offers the novel idea that we should fund innovation, not people who have spent years avoiding it:

Reading the news that General Motors and Chrysler are now lining up for another $20 billion or so in U.S. government aid - on top of the billions they've already received or requested - leaves me with the sick feeling that we are subsidizing the losers and for only one reason: because they claim that their funerals would cost more than keeping them on life support. Sorry, friends, but this is not the American way. Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we'll get out of this crisis.

GM has become a giant wealth-destruction machine - possibly the biggest in history - and it is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so they can truly start over under new management with new labor agreements and new visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money should focus on startups, not bailouts.

You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners - university endowments and pension funds - are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose.

If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors' upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.

If we are going to be spending billions of taxpayer dollars, it can't only be on office-decorating bankers, over-leveraged home speculators and auto executives who year after year spent more energy resisting changes and lobbying Washington than leading change and beating Toyota.

Also, any business that gets taxpayer funds should be partially owned by the taxpayers. They could have the option of buying taxpayers' shares back -- after paying us back.

Oh, and don't miss the hilarious bit above -- the notion that the government has the capacity to decide what wise business ventures would be.