This bit was on the Daily Show:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-october-25-2012/picking-winners---losers

8% of green companies the U.S government bet on failed, but over 20% of companies Bain Capital bet on failed?

I will let others end up trying to do spin adjustment here.

Well yeah.

The government's goal in saving company is to save the company no matter how much money it costs.

Meanwhile Bain capital's goal is to save a company to make a profit... and if they can't sell it for a lesser profit.

In otherwords... say you've got a crappy company that's going to fail... and they both throw money at it.

At a point, when it almost becomes a huge money sink not worth saving anymore,.. Bain Capital bows out and sells the assets... while the government would still throws tax money at it, until it either eventually finally succeeds or crashes despite all the money thrown at it/public pressure.

It's worth noting the term "picking winners and losers" literally means "Picking who wins and who loses."

The government is interested in this.

Bain Capital isn't.   Bain capital is intersted in trying to save companies for a profit.

So i mean... if Bain Capital was better at it... that would make government even more incompetant then most people think.

It's hardly apples to apples when Bain is risking its own money, so has to know when to cut its losses. Whereas the government doesn't give a shit about wasting taxpayer money, so it's quite willing to throw more money at a company than its worth.

I'd much prefer a track record of profits and losses among the companies that Bain has owned vs. the ones the government has put a lot of money in.

I think that'd be vastly more telling about what $1 does for Bains investments than the US governments.

This.  For proof, just look at General Motors... billions ot taxpayer dollars thrown at it by Uncle Sam just to keep the auto workers unions fat and happy.  GM's stock would have to more than double for the gov't, aka the taxpayers, to make their money back.

Lmao. Yea cause people investing their own money into companies is the same as the government forcing taxpayers to buy into companies that they probably have never heard about and definitely had no say in the investment. The fact is, the government shouldn't even have a track record in investments. That's not why the government was established.

That and you also have to wait and see. Bain's record is over many years/decades, while Obama's is only for 3-4 years. He may end up with a 80-90% fail record. Hell, just a week or 2 ago another green company (can't remember their name, but they made batteries for electric cars) went belly up.

Bain Capital is one of the companies the government invested money in. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-federal-bailout-that-saved-mitt-romney-20120829

So effectively you can't judge the performance of government investment without taking into consideration the performance of Bain Capital.

The third way (free market economics with intervention on an as-needed basis) has more or less been government's role since the emergence of the proto-capitalist epoch.

Essentially this ...

It should also be noted that the government picks "Green Companies" in a very different way than a venture capital firm would. A highly profitable corporation (like GE) decides to go forward with solar power research and then lobbies the government to subsidize the research and development they were going to do anyways. In contrast, a man who's been producing bio-diesel from waste materials for him and his friends decides to scale his production to provide enough fuel for a bio-diesel gas station and approaches a venture capitalist for the start up capital.

GE will go forward with the R&D regardless while the bio-diesel gas station will likely only exist if a venture capitalist invests; and GE is a corporation which is unlikely to fail, while hundreds of those small bio-diesel manufacturers will fail until a handful grow into being able to produce enough fuel at a low enough cost to become giants of the industry.

Essentially, venture capital has high fail rates while government subsidies have high corruption rates ...

Sorry, but isn't the point of Bain Capital to be a venture capitalist? That is, extremely high risk.