Roger Simon at Politico proclaims: “In a startling departure, the Obama administration has decided that the price of failure in America should be failure.” I’m not sure what administration Simon is observing but it isn’t this one.

If the Obama administration decided the price of failure should be failure, it wouldn’t have a committee of car company novices constructing plans for the beleaguered companies (“You merge; you over there, fire your CEO.”). It would not be offering GM more and more taxpayer subsidies. If the price of failure were failure, failing companies would be heading to bankruptcy court (where they may still wind up with a whole lot of meddling along the way.)

Richard Haass had it right when he explained:

This is the Brave New World.  What we have are public-private partnerships across the US economy.  What used to be called the private sector is now the public-private sector. And this is not the last of this sort of thing we’re going to see.  There’s no way the United States gives tens of billions of dollars to what used to be called private firms and doesn’t have strings attached. Get used to this.

The notion that Obama has now shown himself to be some sort of defender of market discipline is ludicrous. He is demonstrating that the price of failure in America is the government moving in, taking over your business, firing your CEO, spending taxpayers’ money, and imposing a hodgepodge of social policies.