See, you are focusing on the very top CEOs that government keeps artificially afloat with corporate welfare. And this is a prime example of an entity that is not meritorious. In "realityville," the unmeritorious companies go bankrupt. [/fullstop] That right there, realityville is a wise idea as it separates the wheat from the chaff. However, politicians are weak and for sale.

And the people are idiots that don't know better who were raise on Keynesian economics, which creates much more space for failure than Austrian economics. In Keynesian economics, we keep fixing the bad-business practices of poor business decisions with more new money instead of the types of real-world consequences that would see low (and many times unmeritorious) men out of a job.

When you move from the Keynesian model to the Austrian model, successful people and corporations did it by themselves, and the market sorts out the winners and the losers without help from "free money." If a nation-state keeps crutching on free money and market manipulations of that sort, sooner or later, the world loses faith in their trade instruments, just as the world has lost faith in the dollar and our gross expansion of it.

Idiot CEOs that need a bailout, what they needed was a pink slip. And their customers who trusted them needed a taste of failure. They needed to eat shit to learn why it's a bad idea to fail. If you keep bailing them out, then nobody evolves and gets good.

If you ride a bike and fail, but instead of skinning your knee, a magical burst of wind blows up from the sewers and keeps you afloat, it doesn't make a better bike rider. The magic shit wind stops you from learning how to ride a bike. The same is true with businesses and the notion of free money that keeps getting replaced at the taxpayer's expense without consequences.

"Sure, some skill and competence and "conscientiousness" might move you from the bottom to the middle, maybe, if you're lucky, it's still a roll of the dice."

That's the thing about success in the marketplace. It's not about luck at all. There is good business that meets the market's demands, and then there are poor businesses that do not. The poor business decisions that are unmeritorious deserve to fail and not receive free and magical money.

The private/public partnership that the FED has with the U.S. government keeps it in funny money regardless of its merit, and this is why we have a shit government. We would do well to pretend that magical $ does not exist, and this is because for all practical purposes, it does not, and everything comes at a price.