This line of thinking is the worst sort of ideological nonsense: the tax payers are bailing out a failed company with their own money, but because that bailout

This line of thinking is the worst sort of ideological nonsense: the tax payers are bailing out a failed company with their own money, but because that bailout is administered by the government, which is, a priori, hopelessly inefficient, we dare not ask for anything in return lest the government really screw things up? In case you didn't notice, these companies are already failed, and we're bailing them out. You're not "investing in them with a profit motive", you are forcibly having your tax dollars transferred to them. It's ridiculous that we would do so without any upside on the recovery. This is corporate welfare plain and simple. The really shocking thing is how our corporate oligarchs in American have turned "nationalize" into such a dirty word that regular people reflexively dismiss it as if it were Stalinist communism.