While that is a sensible opinion the 2008 crash showed that it is not the opinion of decision makers in the US.

Fwiw, this is a facile argument. You make no attenpt to demonstrate that after major reorganization (breakup / nationalization) that the firm will continue to have the desirable attributes (innovation, efficincy, ability to build) that made them too important to fail.

Why should I have to pay for their failure but not be rewarded when they profit.

Essentially as a taxpayer I'm being forced to take all the downside risk without any gain.

Nobody in the universe would make that trade.

You didn't respond to anything I said. If you want to shout into the void, notepad.exe is right there.

I’m curious if those of you calling for nationalization have worked for the government or a state-owned enterprise like Amtrak. People should witness the effects of long-term public sector ownership on productivity and effectiveness in a workplace.

Yeah, like IBM and Intel and GE and GM are shining examples of how effectively the private sector runs companies. Maybe large enterprises are by their nature inefficient. Maybe productivity isn't the best metric for a utility. We could, for instance, prioritize resiliency, longevity, accessibility, and environmental concerns.

Even those problematic companies exemplify the difference: when enterprises are mismanaged and fail, capital is reallocated away from them.

The US government just allocated $10b towards Intel, and bailed out GM in the past. So what you said is clearly not the case. Now we have publicly-funded private management that is failing. At least if they were publicly owned and managed outright, they wouldn't be gutted by executives prioritizing quarterly profits.

Executives should prioritize producing things people are willing to pay money for cheaply. If there is a bias towards short-termism, that is a governance problem that should be addressed.

I agree that the US taking stakes or picking winners is bad, I don't think it follows that nationalization is the solution.

The USPS does more for its workers and customers than FedEx. There are addresses FedEx won't service due to "inefficiencies", hand over packages to the USPS for delivery.

Sure, but I have witnessed the cost of having to bail out organisations that realised we'd do so and so lost any sense of moral hazard.

I also gave an alternative.