I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment but I don't trust "elected representatives" to fairly represent my interests.

I want voting shares issued directly to me in an amount equal to my financial contribution (tax dollars / currency devaluation) towards their bailout.

> I don't trust "elected representatives"

> want voting shares issued directly to me

Um... what are you going to do with your voting shares if not vote for elected representatives (the board, the CEO) that you'll have to trust to represent your interests?!

I think the idea is, at least there's one less level of indirection if the voting shares are issued directly to taxpayers.

In practice this is both hard to do (denominator issue) and leaves control in the hands of a small number.

The latter problem is also the argument against index funds (which I’m in favor if, but I appreciate the argument)

> ...leaves control in the hands of a small number.

Yes but it would still provide a considerably larger number of controllers (and with more diverse interests) than our current system.

> In practice this is both hard to do (denominator issue) ...

Excellent point here. It would be incredibly difficult.

Here's a thought though ...

Warning! I'm about to talk about cryptocurrency. Everyone might want to put on their futurism hats and keep their downvoting finger at bay, at least until I finish.

This problem wouldn't be very hard at all to solve in a world where the bailout currency has similar properties to blockchain based cryptocurrencies. Company shares could be issued as an "airdropped" token to everyone holding the currency at the block height during which the bailout is agreed upon. Those tokens could be used directly to vote on shareholder matters and in a way that is fully fair and transparent.

Yes I know. We are still many decades (and maybe centuries) out from a world in which cryptocurrency actually works how it's meant to. One day though...it's gonna be glorious.

Alright, I'm done. Downvote away.

I didn't really follow the blockchain thing - but now I'm curious - is blockchain (as tech) essentially money with built-in metadata? The whole 'proof-of-work' thing seemed a bit potlatch to me, but building publicly-accessable metadata into money seems like an interesting (although possibly scary) idea.

These companies were shut down under extraordinary circumstances, and the economy also shut down in a very uneven way and for an indefinite time, with another potential shutdown to counter a winter resurgence. About half of Americans are still not under lockdown.

The picture to me is that the country does not consider itself as in the same boat.

These companies have made incredible profits for many years by nickel-and-diming customers, squeezing employees, and ignoring large-scale environmental costs, and then diverted the proceeds into the pockets of a small number of extremely wealthy people instead of using it to prepare for possible shocks.

If the people are going to bail them out, the people should get an ownership stake.

The airline industry is famously unprofitable; they make a bit of money for a few years, then lose all that money, and repeat the cycle. From what I understand, it has been this way for at least 40 years.

https://www.mcgill.ca/iasl/files/iasl/ASPL614-Five-Reasons-A...

While I generally agree and would avoid airline investments personally, the airlines did just spend their profits for years on dividends and stock buybacks. If you don’t save for a rainy day, then it’s not too surprising you run out during bad times...

Dividends and buybacks don't change net profit, so it has no effect on the analysis that the industry as a whole is not very profitable over long time periods.

I think you misunderstood what our parent post meant. They are not questioning that airlines are not very profitable but that because of the low profit margins, the airlines should've saved those money and not spend it on stock buyback.

The outrage around stock buybacks is silly. It’s pretty much the same outcome as paying a dividend, just achieved in a slightly different way. The real problem is the current incentive structure. If your industry knows it will be bailed out, then the incentive is to not have enough cash on hand. Because anybody who saved for a rainy day will end up in a worse position than those who didn’t, and then just got a bailout. I’d say the solution is to either be more willing to let companies fail, or to structure bailouts in a way that represents a massive failure for shareholders, by significantly diluting their equity for instance.

You’re saying “don’t hate the player, hate the game”, but the thing is: we can hate both.

If you’re hating people for making completely rational decisions, then you’re just going to end up being pretty hateful.

My first point was that doing a share buyback is essentially the same thing as paying a dividend from a profit-allocation perspective. They’re both just different ways to use profits to return value to shareholders. The outrage over using that particular instrument is mostly just based on ignorance.

The outrage over these companies deciding to return that value to shareholders, rather than using it to prepare for ups and downs (in a notoriously unstable industry) is mostly justified. However it is entirely misplaced. It’s not just that they can win by doing the wrong thing, but due to the nature of historical bailouts, they risk massively losing out by doing the right thing.

There is no system of economics that can survive by rewarding failure. Failure must always be a possible outcome when taking a risk. These companies are simply taking advantage of a government provided incentive to fail. You have every right to get mad at them for making the rational decision, but that is just getting mad for the sake of getting mad.

In my comment I specifically cited dividends in addition to buybacks as I agree they both represent money that was returned to shareholders and could have been saved.

I don’t agree with your claim that the companies are incentivized to be insolvent so they get nice bailouts or they’ll get left behind. Looking at the auto industry in 2008, GM desperately needed a bailout and got $18 billion and the government ended up taking over the company, going bankrupt, and then the assets were sold off cheaply to make a new company. How is that advantageous for the shareholders (who lost everything!) compared to the other auto companies like Ford which did not need a bailout and were simply forced to take a smaller amount of money (~$5 billion) to boost their coffers and build investor confidence during the crisis. Ford never needed the cash (except arguably as a confidence buffer) and never went bankrupt so the shareholders made out better.

Obviously, they do. If the net profit of the company is zero, but all the actual profit is paid out to the shareholders, but all the losses are paid by the taxpayers / government, then the net profit to the shareholders is positive.

Great business plan though. I want in on it (after the crisis / losses)!

So if a business model struggles over the long term, should they or should they not be saving a rainy day fund? Are you saying it’s the tax payer’s responsibility? I’m really struggling to understand what point you’re trying to make.

We should probably look at why the business model is struggling over the long term. If nobody can make money in a business, that's a sign that too much has been invested in the sector.

It used to be that way. Recently airlines have been profitable enough to have no better idea what to do with their money than buying back stock for billions of dollars.

Why does anyone put their money into airlines then?

if this is true then it was even more prudent for them to keep savings for the future and not do stock buyback.

Coincidentally, this occurred as the airline industry became deregulated.

Maybe that's telling us something.

Any private investor would demand the same.

Bailouts for government-mandated shutdowns in crises are different than saving the banks for screwing up while trying to make more money.

Cheap air travel facilitated the global spread of the virus, they're not exactly innocent bystanders.

This is the point everyone is missing. These guys literally make their money facilitating the global spread of the virus. They want to externalize all of the negative impacts of their business model.

OK. Fine.

But now we get a cut. You don't just externalize all the costs for dealing with the virus off onto us and then also have us pay to ensure your profits don't take a dip to boot. That would be the most insane deal American taxpayers could ever make.

Of course we should get a fair cut of the airlines dependent on the size and structure of the bailout. Anyone saying otherwise has just not thought the whole thing through.

Small, dense living quarters facilitated it too!

Living quarters facilitate local spread.

Trains and cars facilitate national spread.

Planes and ships facilitate global spread.

Each of these has adjutant consequences of increasing severity. With planes and ships imparting the most severe consequences. Difference between planes and ships being that ships have medical staff, and you can quarantine them in port if necessary. Which we did mostly. (Of course, we probably should have done the same with airliners but hindsight is always 20/20).

Cheap car travel facilitated the global spread of the virus. They're not exactly innocent bystanders.

Globalization facilitated the global spread of the virus, anyone with an international supply chain is not exactly innocent bystanders.

Social activity facilitated the global spread of the virus. Meetup.com is not exactly an innocent bystander.

etc...

Not sure what you're trying to say here. The point is that airlines were directly profiting by staying operational while the virus was already spreading. Had they been more proactive in curbing international travel then they would also have been able to resume business sooner.

Cars are not commercial entities that profit from spreading the virus. Rideshare and taxi services would be a different story, but even then they do so in a much more localized manner. Similarly if meetup didn't shut down its services soon enough the yes it did facilitate the spread for profit.

Economic globalization (movement of goods) on the other hand can work without moving people around as much.

All true statements.

The same criticisms can be applied to any businesses within these industries initially looking to be given billions in monetary grants without equity in return.

People were flying less and cancelling flights far before the govt mandated lockdowns

But it was exogenous to the airlines, unlike the financial crisis, which was caused by malinvestment (by the banks themselves,) among other things.

The airlines also invested poorly this time around though. They spent all their money on dividends and buybacks instead of saving for a downtown. American Airlines, which was the worst balance sheet, famously declared they were doing so well that the airline industry wouldn’t hit a catastrophe again!

“American Airlines has been rather irresponsible with its capital allocation in recent years. As shown in the tables above, it spent the highest proportion of its operating cash flow (52%) on dividends and buybacks, despite also spending more on capex than any of its peers.”

“American paid for most of this capex by issuing debt and entering sale-leaseback transactions. Meanwhile, it returned a little more than half of its operating cash flow to shareholders over this period, mainly through buybacks.”

https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/03/25/american-airlines-...

This article tries to make the point that not all airlines were equally bad but let’s face it American was the first one to need a bailout and they definitely squandered their financial position.

Let's say that AA didn't do any buybacks - instead they saved up all of the money that they would have spent on buy backs in the last few years. Would that have been enough to survive this pandemic?

Yes, likely. In 2015 and 2016 alone they paid $8.346 billion in buybacks and they seem to pay roughly a $0.40 dividend every year. Either way it would have allowed them to borrow less money at much better terms. Instead they are totally insolvent immediately and people have a more negative view of bailing them out because they appear irresponsible.

The airline companies are the major spreaders of c19. While unintentional, this is a fact as is their ability to have put in some safeguards to slow down prevention like forcing sick people to wear masks and gloves (and ideally to fly on separate planes when possible) and disinfecting their planes after each flight. In this case, they directly caused a huge part of this crisis, much more so than in 2008. Also, airlines that have done stock buybacks should never be bailed out. They knowingly put themselves into a poor situation that should bankrupt them. In all of these cases, the airlines themselves are culpable and don't deserve any bailouts.

Well when you put it like that, WE that is to say the public are really directly responsible for the spread of the virus, by travelling when sick.

People are not responsible, the government who could've mandated such measures aren't responsible but the airlines are?

The government is definitely responsible. They fucked up testing. They fucked up contact tracing. They fucked up stocking for supplies. They fucked up handling travelers and quarantining them. They are still lying to people about the effectiveness of masks. They called it a hoax and pretended it wasn't happening. In fact, I can't think of a single thing the US government didn't fuck up. Most other governments were not much better. But I understand you want to blame the people, most of whom were asymptomatic, for spreading a disease they didn't know about that, at least in the US, was called a hoax, that the Chinese arrested people for talking about. Yes, it's their fault not the fault of the government that is supposed to prepare and handle such issues. Absurd.

And yes, the airlines played their part in it too, not disinfecting, not requiring masks, not caring a single bit about the safety of their passengers. Now they want a bailout because they couldn't manage their cash properly and decided to increase their stock price with stock buybacks instead of saving cash for a rainy day like this one. Absurd.

Airlines could have limited the spread.

Serious question: do we have historical comparisons, can we refer to instances where nationalizing in the wake of a bailout led to positive results?

The one comparable I can think of in the US is Amtrak, which is functional although not exactly wildly successful.

If we let the airlines go under, I wonder how much funding so called bullet trains and Hyperloop, etc would get in the USofA. We depend on Airlines way too much.

Edit: Maybe not "go under", but at least try and bail themselves out. We need to fund alternatives.

The planes won't vanish. The staff won't vanish. When demand resumes, new airlines will fly new routes, and those who made a fortune over the last 10 years from stock buybacks will be the ones who lost.

Clearly that won't happen. Income taxes will rise to pay for the stockholder protection act. Tax the productive to subsidize the wealthy.

UK government bailed out Rolls-Royce by nationalising it, turned it into a successful company, and then privatised it again 18 years later(there's a common argument made that perhaps it was nationalised for too long, but the effect was certainly positive).

I'm not sure the UK nationalizing car companies is a great example that we should be looking at - via British Leyland, they nationalized a lot of brands that never really recovered (Rover, Triumph, Austin, etc.).

> car companies

It wasn't about cars, it was about jet engines. The original Rolls-Royce produced both cars and airplane engines and was nationalize in 1971. The automobile part of the business was sold by the government two years later in 1973 as Rolls-Royce Motors while Rolls-Royce Limited produced jet engines and remained nationalized for 18 years.

Today Rolls-Royce is the second largest manufacturer of jet engines, after GE.

This is a bad faith question.

The real question is, “Why were the airlines so poorly equipped to handle a cataclysmic event when the last one was only 19 years ago?”

The answer is short term profitability.

And the follow up question is, “Why would ANYONE bail any for-profit company out to the benefit of the shareholders only, ever?”

How could an airline company possibly be equipped to handle this kind of situation?

If you want to be competitive on the market you need to lower costs and cut down on margins. You can't just have a big pile of money lying around "in case all flight is halted for a few weeks/months"

> If you want to be competitive on the market you need to lower costs and cut down on margins.

Yes, exactly. There are certain businesses that should not be subject to market forces: essential services that have tiny margins.

> You can't just have a big pile of money lying around "in case all flight is halted for a few weeks/months"

Then you get nationalized ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If you want to be privatized again, make enough money to do buybacks.

Maybe you can... Berkshire Hathaway? Or even apple or google?

> You can't just have a big pile of money lying around in case...

Banks and corporations are requiring their employees and the government to do this for them, while simultaneously claiming to be profitable.

>You can't just have a big pile of money lying around "in case all flight is halted for a few weeks/months"

That's what insurance is for.

If an airline can't afford to buy adequate insurance, then it isn't actually a profitable businesses.

If market pressures make it impossible for airlines to run operations in a financially responsible way, then that may illustrate the fact that markets don't always create the best outcomes.

Pandemic insurance? Lack of customers insurance? Do they sell that?

No, there was no insurance you can buy for this scenario that will cover $30, $50, $100 billion in accumulated losses if you're eg Delta Airlines.

There are no insurance companies that can afford that or that would back it, including Berkshire Hathaway (and they're among the only ones that could even attempt it).

If you tried it, you'd just take down the entire insurance industry again as they suddenly might have to eat $100 billion in losses across the segment in one year, paying out epic cash that nobody outside of Apple, Microsoft and Google have to pay out.

This is exactly the scenario where you should socialize losses across the giant government with the Fed's printing press and balance sheet, and simultaneously also ensure the government and its taxpayers get a fair deal (the airlines have to pay it back, and or taxpayers get the equity which can be sold off and receive dividends over time; all the US airlines were worth maybe $90 billion prior to the crash, producing like $18b in operating profit per year).

I don't know. If they don't, or if it's unaffordable, then that means that a lot of "private" businesses are actually implicitly backed by public money. Something to bear in mind the next time these companies complain about government interference, or libertarian types complain about paying taxes.

Most likely, the price of flights would be an order of magnitude greater if airlines weren't (through various direct and indirect means) publicly subsidised.

Maybe by not doing billions worth of stock buybacks over the last 10 years? They've literally been shut down for what... a month??

If AAL had saved their entire 2019 free cash flow (literally impossible), they would still be $6B short of their projected expenses. There is very little of their cost structure that declines when the planes are parked: Employees need paychecks. Lease payments are due on the engines and airframes. Rent needs to be paid on facilities. The fuel savings from not flying are offset by the need to mothball aircraft.

At least then we’d have to pay a much smaller bailout.

>If you want to be competitive on the market you need to lower costs and cut down on margins.

Or, maybe such a business model isn't (and shouldn't) be supported by the current rules of the free market. I would say "you can't just toss in billions on average every few years" and call that a legit business model for a for-profit private corporation.

> You can't just have a big pile of money lying around "in case all flight is halted for a few weeks/months"

You can. Keep it in some liquid investment vehicle so you can withdraw it at anytime. If you don’t want to do that, then go under and shut your business. Don’t ask tax payers to bail you out. I’m not sure why this notion of responsibility is so difficult.

by wiping out the existing shareholders and clawing back incentives to senior execs. you can do this through bankruptcy, an fdic-like asset reallocation (without consolidation into larger corps), or something else.

then the remaining market participants will figure out how to better account for such risks, which can no longer be considered rare (if they ever should have been).

Or, legislation could be used to ensure everyone has to have that big pile of money / mitigation strategies present, so that they won't get cut out by competitive pressure.

(And then the hard trick is ensuring the next folks in office won't dismantle that legislation to make some cash on the side.)

Yeah everyone seems to ignore this fact.

Tyler Cowen made an interesting point on a recent Econtalk episode that no passenger wants the airlines' stockholders wiped out. If you wipe out the stockholders, it skews the incentives of the executives against safety, and in favor of profits. The reason is that the primary (financial) incentive to run safe airline is to maintain reputation/goodwill (which is a form of equity), and if you wipe out all the equity, they have nothing to lose.

Wait, this is the industry that produced the 737 MAX, which skirted regulations and design flaws to avoid costly retrofits, redesigns and training, in order to maximize profits for shareholders.

This is the industry actively sending out planes for repair and refurb to sketchy offshore repair centers, in order to maximize profits for shareholders.

This is the industry that lobbies against more strict pilot fatigue rules, in order to maximize profits for shareholders.

This is the industry that spent the last decade investing heavily in stock buybacks instead of improving passenger experience, maintenance of their planes and employee well being, in order to maximize profits for their shareholders.

Seems maintaining shareholder profitability is its own safety issue.

It's not just for the benefit of the shareholders though. If it were I'd agree with you - but bailing out these companies is for the benefit of consumers, who would otherwise be without an airline industry for a while.

We should try to get the shareholders to pay for as much of it as possible though, whilst allowing the industry to stay solvent. This seems like some of the intention of making bailouts in the form of low-to-zero-interest loans (not sure if that's the form the bailout ended up taking).

Just gonna come right out & assert what kind of faith is backing the question eh?

GM and AIG are two examples from the last financial crisis. Both went back into private hands.

At a small profit to the US taxpayers, even.

We lost $11 billion according to this article.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-gm-treasury/u-s-gov...

We made a profit overall in the program that included GM/AIG's bailouts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/business/us-signals-end-o...

> In all, through TARP and other efforts, taxpayers injected $426.35 billion into banks and auto companies. The sale of stock and interest payments brought in $441.7 billion.

If you made a 3.5% profit (total, not per annum) on your incredibly risky investments between early 2009 and 2014, that's a fail.

You're only counting the dollar return. As a social institution of government, you'd want to price in the upside of not having the US auto manufacturing industry implode, with vast unemployment, lost manufacturing that would never return, and GM itself collapsing along with its jobs. It's considerably beyond your figures.

Alternative, nationalize it? Now that's a real disaster, having the US Government in the auto manufacturing business.

Regardless it's extremely low on risk in fact. That's partially magic printed fun dollars paid for via the Fed's obese balance sheet.

And that's exactly where the latest monster stimulus is going to come from. We most certainly are not paying down any of that debt, it only rolls one direction for the past ~18 years. We'll plop trillions more onto the Federal debt, push interest debt yields lower over time to compensate, and wake up tomorrow to a bright sunny day like it never happened (rinse and repeat until some day, 20 or 30 years into the future, when we can't keep doing it).

I'm not saying the government made a bad decision, but they should have rigged the deal more in favour of the people instead of the company if things succeeded.

Getting a 3.5% return over that time period didn't account for the risk that they took. They should have ended up at least doubling their money at the cost of the shareholders/equityholders that remained.

You're pretty confused if you think "the company" won if the taxpayer didn't. In the GM case, "the company" was owned by shareholders who lost 100% of their equity. The bondholders lost a lot, too.

For you or I, yes.

We aren’t big enough to put “saved the economy” in the pros column.

I’m not sure that saved the economy. If GM failed, someone else can and would take their previous share of the market. In the short term there’s pain for GM employees, suppliers, etc. but in the long term, corporate america realizes their losses won’t be socialized.

It blows my mind this country of anti socialism whose media was comparing my native country (Denmark) to Venezuela is so much against the common man but when it comes to the wealthy elites, it’s like your poor people have been taught to voluntarily empty out their pockets.

Socialism == bad somehow until it’s time to bail out corporate America, and even then, your people are against nationalizing these companies. So what lesson do their corporate boards learn? Nothing other than the American population whose already been robbed will foot the bill.

The GM bailout was, in essence, a partial and temporary nationalization. The losses weren't socialized; again, the US taxpayer made a small profit off the rescue program.

I'm all for a critique of the American attitude that "socialism" is automatically bad, but TARP etc. isn't a great example of that attitude.

Didn’t the US Government get stock in GM when they bailed it out in 2008? They ended up breaking even as the claim goes

Doesn't Norway own the majority of their oil company?

This is why I suggest operating the companies via a democratically-elected board. If the management sucks, vote them out.

At the very least, demand planes give passengers 1-2 more inches to every seat.

a short-term oversight is warranted to get a company reorganized (happens in bankruptcies, for example), but long-term oversight can be detrimental to the best interests of citizens by keeping companies overly constrained from feeling and responding to market conditions.

and as others have noted, the return to citizens of such companies goes beyond its profits, so it's wise not to get to focused just on distributing those profits.

beyond that, let's make sure the shareholders and executives feel the pain of their decisions, so they can adjust for risk in the future. let shareholders take a serious haircut (you can cram them down by creating a large pool of new, unallocated stock) and for execs, take back all incentives beyond a reasonable salary for the past 5 years. you can take that reclaimed incentive and form forward-going incentives the execs can work for again.

> It's time the citizens started getting a return on their tax dollars if they're being used for private investment.

US citizens have already seen massive return on their 2008 bailout. These bailouts aren't free money, they're just loans that get paid back, with interest.

While I think the widespread negative reaction to bailouts is generally uninformed, the interest rates on bank bailouts was ridiculously low. And from what I understand, banks spent it in self-serving ways like stock buybacks and fat executive bonuses. I mean, why wouldn’t they. Without oversight, their priority is to shareholders.

It's overall $100b profit over $700b investment: https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/ and that doesn't account for the positive effect it had on overall economy by reassuring everyone. I'd say it's not so low at all. And if you lend someone money and then he returns it back with interest, does it matter what he did with it?

> A board/council of nationally elected representatives should manage whatever share of these companies the government owns

This has succeeded practically zero times in the history of nationalisation. Transitioning a culture from private ownership to public is highly value destroying. And putting electeds in charge of companies goes about as one would expect in terms of venality and competence.

The better strategy is to have a board appointed by elected representatives with a finite term and mandate to return the assets to private ownership.

> Transitioning a culture from private ownership to public is highly value destroying

You know what else is value-destroying? Giving money to failed companies for free. Everyone's a capitalist until something bad happens, then they go running to Free Money Center to pick up their welfare check.

> And putting electeds in charge of companies goes about as one would expect in terms of venality and competence.

Yes, failing companies are a paragon of competence.

> You know what else is value-destroying? Giving money to failed companies for free.

We agree on this. I think companies should be allowed to fail. If we can’t afford that, their shareholders (and managements’ parachutes) should be wiped out, and the public should get economic upside. Bailouts should be a painful last resort.

But the public should not get control. Particularly not open-ended control by a board of politicians.

> Giving money to failed companies for free.

That's not what bailouts are.

Why not just make it a loan?

>All bailed out companies should be nationalized to some extent

Is there an example of nationalized company that operates in free market and still manages to turn a profit for the investors(citizens).

I wouldn't make an investment in usps or amtrak as a citizen with profit motive as a tax payer.

Nationalised companies like USPS and local utilities turn a profit for the customers and externalities to promote the general welfare, as it should be.

Equinor (formerly Statoil) does fairly well for Norway.

The reason Norway does well with oil in a socialized manner is because their oil per capita is extreme, and the action of extracting and exporting oil from a well-known oil zone is a predictable industrial activity (prices are the primary wild card that you adapt to). It's among the highest per capita oil production in the world. That is not a scenario that replicates to our incompetent Congress managing airlines for a couple hundred million people, and such that the airline finances are a rounding error for the American people (annual checks for maybe $20 per adult), while we shovel more complexity and bloat on the Congressional plate (when they're not doing their job well as it is; do not give them anything else to manage that isn't absolutely necessary). The better way is to implement payback / return requirements for any bailout.

There is a good reason why Norway doesn't lead the world in very many things industrially, a reason why there are not plentiful other examples out of Norway of this model working.

Yes but not many because Chicago School Economics says you immediately privatize them in that case.

This line of thinking is the worst sort of ideological nonsense: the tax payers are bailing out a failed company with their own money, but because that bailout is administered by the government, which is, a priori, hopelessly inefficient, we dare not ask for anything in return lest the government really screw things up?

In case you didn't notice, these companies are already failed, and we're bailing them out. You're not "investing in them with a profit motive", you are forcibly having your tax dollars transferred to them. It's ridiculous that we would do so without any upside on the recovery. This is corporate welfare plain and simple. The really shocking thing is how our corporate oligarchs in American have turned "nationalize" into such a dirty word that regular people reflexively dismiss it as if it were Stalinist communism.

Its not a 'line of thinking' , it was an interpretation of parent comment 'getting a return on their tax dollars' in terms of pure monetary profits. Because thats the usual interpretation of ROI when someone buys a stake in a private company. You are ranting about something irrelevant, if thats the case, what does this have to do with stalin.

Maybe gp meant different, i don't know.