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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

You would probably get a better deck too if you provided flights for millions of people or helped disburse money or manufactured vehicles to keep people going to their jobs.

Why do individuals think they should receive the same treatment as key infrastructure companies?

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The companies as such aren’t at risk, only the investors. Take the cruise industry. If Carnival goes bust, the ships and crew will still be there. They will just be bought up by fresh investors at bargain prices and soon be up and running again. If long terms demand for cruises does fall some ships might be scrapped, but that would happen with or without a bailout. The risk of losing necessary infrastructure for that industry without a bailout is close to zero.

The same is true of most industries, bailouts protect investors not economic capacity, but there are exceptions. I don’t like it but there are very few big banks, and it’s just not possible for fresh investors to rapidly buy up the assets of a failed bank and start a new bank. The heavy regulation of the industry is a serous obstacle to that kind of renewal and this is a dangerous problem.

It's not a forgone conclusion that the ships will be there. In liquidation those ships have valuable equipment and scrap metal that could be broken down and sold, returning value to creditors and investors.

Ship breaking is big business.

As they mentioned, if the ship is worth more as scrap than as a ship, they would have happened with or without a bailout.

sure, but the ship might suddenly become worth less as a working vessel in the absence of a functioning cruise line to operate it. my guess is that a operating a single cruise ship is considerably less profitable than each ship in an n-ship fleet.

If they are key infrastructure companies let’s regulate them like utilities.

Why?

They need a bailout every 10 years, otherwise, they're autonomous. While far from perfect, they're better than the government could do if they had to develop their own systems for handling travelers.

Pennies.

So you are saying companies such as Blackrock, Marriot, and Carnival Cruiselines are critical infrastructure?

Maybe OP would start a company that does one or more of those things if the companies dominating those industries were ever allowed to fail.

Why let them fail - so we can wait another decade until someone figures out the knowhow to start a reliable, national airline? So we can keep travellers idle for yet another year without business until a new company is figured out?

"Save the ship if it sinks, let it float if it goes."

If it's "reliable", it wouldn't fail. Without government protectionism picking the favorites, the most "reliable" companies will prevail.

We all fail eventually.

Someone has to pick favorites. Everyone loves fast travel. It enables business.

No brainer.

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