My employer was minimally directly effected by the housing market crash, but due to the intermingling that comprises the financial industry everybody was seriously hurt indirectly. They were forced to purchase, by the federal government, a major stock brokerage that was in serious trouble for pennies on the dollar and assume all their troubled assets.
> Representative government" seems fine until one looks more closely at who is actually represented.
When looking at current politics I find your statement incredibly strange. I used to think the Republican Party represented the wealthy and special interests (certain business interests as both major parties have their special interest priorities). That was years ago when they were the stronger and more dominant of the two US major parties, back when they had values and weren’t so hypocritical about them. But now they seemed to have strangely thrown away dominance for a failed bet on populism to energize some new core constituents to the disgust of everyone else. I have trouble finding who is actually represented by that, but then I guess a lot of people have that trouble which explains that parties atrophy.
Over most of USA history, both parties active at any particular time serve the interests of capital. There are occasional exceptions (e.g. FDR), but now is not such an exception. It's silly to emphasize the difference between parties, but if we must do so the past two decades in which control of Congress and the presidency has passed back and forth are something of an anomaly. Before Bush the Lesser, the last time Republicans were in any sense "dominant" was under Hoover. The Democrats held the House for twenty consecutive Congressional sessions.
If the stories you've been told, about your bank or about the USA political system or about anything else, don't make sense, then consider the possibility that those stories simply aren't true.
> Has anyone ever had to be "forced" to purchase anything for "pennies on the dollar"?
There is typically not much interest in the purchase of something with a high negative value even if highly discounted. That is why it was mandated by the government, so that a large solvent organization could assume another large groups insolvency before the insolvent group closes and strikes their assets.
Why ruin an otherwise reasonable argument with an out-of-nowhere jab at representative democracy? If anything, without legitimate elected officials in charge, the problem would have been more acute.
This time around, that modicum of public discussion was avoided but we all gave those who can afford teams of lobbyists and lawyers lots of money anyway. For version 3, we can expect automatic deductions from the checking accounts of the bottom half of the income bracket, with automatic credit card transactions against those without checking accounts, to be transferred directly to entertainment allowances for Bezos, Musk, Gates, Buffett, MbL, and various estranged spouses thereof. "Representative government" seems fine until one looks more closely at who is actually represented.