>Look at it this way. How did big companies become big? They weren't always big. They probably started out small. They invested and took chances and hired people who wanted to work. It takes years of planning and investing, often decades, to get "big" enough to hire just 20 people.

I know - at the best of the bad times, my partners and I couldn't afford to hire more than four more people.

Which makes those who became big so much faster very suspect. And you're right, I'm ranting about something else.

>If you think the government should give you the same benefits as it does to company like GM, your dreaming and it wouldn't make any since to do so. Look what happened today with stock-markets over seas for fear that the US economy is going bad. Remember the phrase "It's the economy stupid"?
>For people like you and me, the government hope we're clever enough to find jobs. If we're not, we better get off our a$$ and get smart.

And those who have become rich enough can remain stupid, they'll be bailed out. Like someone said during this sub-prime (aka usury) loan crisis, "it's essential for functioning of the market economy that those who go bust, well, go bust and vanish. That's how it's supposed to work.". Instead, we're getting the worst of etatism (aka statism) and planned economy, where the worst impediment to productivity came exactly from big enterprises, which knew that they're actually out of reach of the market forces, because no matter how they screw up, they'll be bailed out by everybody else, for they are the livelihood of thousands of families. So they kept screwing up, and those who could have produced more or better had no incentive to do so, because their surplus was going into feeding the failures.

And everybody here seems to accept the excuses for the same behavior here, in the heart of capitalism. We'll keep screwing up, and the state will bail us out, because... ah, gimme a break.