>I think the thing that scares me the most is that there is getting to be no penalty for failing anymore. If somebody fails, they should fail. They shouldn't get bailed out. If there's no penalty for failing, that means there's no reward for not failing. See where I'm going?

Yes - I was there 25 years ago. The probably worst part of the socialist market economy was that the safety net was inside the enterprise, which meant that it's not the people we don't let fall, it's companies. No matter what sort of drunken idiot lazy bums are running them, no matter what sort of apres moi, le deluge policy they may have established internally, no matter how stupid their decisions were, in most of the cases they were just too big to fail (yep, heard that tune, played on accordion, many times before), therefore bros, here's the bag, please fill. Which meant that some of these bags turned out to be endless and bottomless, and (more important) that no matter how good you were, and worked with smart people who made right decisions one after another, contributed to satisfying the needs of your comrades and the market rewarded you handsomely - you weren't allowed to keep most of it, because there was always the drunken illiterate bums (i.e. CEO and his pals) in that decrepit pigsty across the street who needed the help of us all.

That leads to uravnilovka (i.e. policy of equal bellies) and eventually to "they can never pay me so little as little I can work" (I guess proper poetic transcription would be "I can always work less than they pay me"). No matter the worker's social awareness or anything, if he knows that working harder won't get his pocket swelling, he won't. Would you?

Regardless of the system - if work isn't properly rewarded, it will be done at minimal speed and quality. For every guy who got off cheap, by swindling others and getting away with it, by pulling a fast one and getting lost before anyone noticed, by extracting money from a place where they'd rather suffer the loss than publicly suffer the shame (and diminished confidence in their security), for every bailout CEO who takes home a few million a month in a middle of a disaster... there's a dozen guys who say "screw this - why should I break my neck over this work, for only this pittance? Look at those guys!".

Printing bailout money (or just inventing neatly arranged bytes to show that it now exists, to the same effect) is no less than stealing that much money from everyone else. The total amount of estate and goods (expressed by the total amount of dollars) in the country didn't increase overnight, but the dollar amount did. Several times. That means that each dollar now buys less, simple as that. Got dollars? Think about it.