Most of the bailouts happened after Bush was gone and Obama ran the meetings before he left (after the election and before inauguration) but I agree, if you are a free marketeer, you should let the market shake things out. GM should have gone through a bankruptcy and reorganized in chapter
11, not as a government company. The federal government still holds a third of all GM stock and it is worth about a third of what they paid for it. The AIG investors should have taken their lumps, just like Lehman. Unfortunately a lot of them were on your side of the pond