Bailing out the banks and GM got me furious many years ago. Imagine if the government stepped in and saved Altavisa / Pets.com, and all the other dot-com boom companies? What good would that have done? Nothing. Let 'em burn and innovation will rise from the ashes.
It's Chicago. The crooked politicians are their own mob. Vice crime may be contracted out to the local gangs, but the rackets are kept strictly in-house.
That way, when you want to buy a senate seat, there's no pesky middleman in the way to jack up prices. You can just go straight to the governor and hand him an envelope of cash under the table.
Can remember one case where I got a 5am ride to the airport. I suspect the guy was driving a friends cab, as his face did not match the registration. He blew through all stop signs we came across. There were no working seatbelts in the cab. I was literally afraid for my life.
Oh and of course his credit card machine was broke, and he had no change, so I have to pay with 20s and get no change back.
In both NYC and Chicago, you can call the cops over this, and they're very responsive (perhaps more so in NYC).
I know what it's like though: I arrived late in to Spain once, I got ripped off as it should have been a fixed fare (I had lived in the city!), but it was late and night and was too tired to argue in Spanish.
I know there are folks legitimately concerned with moral hazard, and genuinely believe letting it all burn down would have been the better approach. I'm just glad they weren't in charge when everything went into a tail spin. I think it would have been a LOT worse for everyone.
The Automaker bailout, in hindsight, seems like it was the better call than letting them fail. If they had failed, the surviving ones would have acquired all the valuable scrap on a fire-sale, expanded to fill the void and you'd probably have more or less the same auto industry today. But in the interim, a lot of people would have lost their jobs. So that's a LOT worse for some, and I honestly can't tell who wins but on aggregate I assume it's a wash.
1 - https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great_depressio...
It is interesting how angry people get about the bank bailouts though, as if it was narrowly targeted at the owners of the banks and not targeted at preserving the entire economy.
Instead of a trillion dollar bailout that went to rich coffers (and most of which was paid back) we could have just thrown the money, mixed, into VC to replace the dead banks (as investment stake, that the government could have sold back later and recouped the costs all the same) and unemployment protection to keep the people temporarily put out of work during the restructuring from destitution.
In that scenario, the robber baron crooks that should have been in prison don't get to waft off on golden parachutes paid with tax money.