Exactly. Governments shouldn't bail out any corporation without a hefty share of ownership in exchange. We did it for Sallie Mae, and we can do it for Intel, Boeing, and the airlines.
The only way to prohibit this would be to cap the maximum size of a corporation. My guess is lawyers would just come up with some legal novelty to work around this in no time at all.
but that's the point of the early-enough forced bankruptcy - to salvage value and re-internalize the downside risk to owners only.
i'm totally down with limiting corporate size, not via a direct statute to that effect, but via a high-functioning antitrust department along with severely progressive taxes. you can get as big as you want, as long as you can internalize all the downside risk of being 'too big to fail'.
As it is, we keep some of these giant companies on life support for years or decades, allowing them to crowd out competition with their sheer size, while also failing to really produce good products that serve their customers.
Real world doesn't work that way. Real world looks much more like the deindustrialized parts of the UK or the US, or the collapse of Soviet economy after switching to capitalism. Companies go bust, taking the whole supply chain with them, workers are laid off and disperse. After a few years, the skills atrophy and the experience vanishes - you cannot put humpty dumpty back together again. More often than not, the workers stay unemployed, underemployed, or just cheat disability. In high-end consolidated markets like semiconductors or aircraft manufacturing, we're not talking about an infinite reservoir, it's a handful of corporations per continent
i’m totally good with throwing out the senior leadership and letting new leadership grow from within though. claw back their bonuses and golden parachutes too.