Joe,

This is a column where Friedman gets it half right.  I agree with him that taxpayers should not give GM and Chrysler an additional $20 billion. I disagree that the money should instead be given to venture capitalists.  

Sorry, friends, but this is not the American way. Bailing out the
losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we?ll get
out of this crisis.

G.M. has become a giant
wealth- destruction machine ? possibly the biggest in history ? and it
is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so they can truly
start over under new management with new labor agreements and new
visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money
should focus on start-ups, not bailouts.

You want to spend $20
billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20
venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because
their partners ? university endowments and pension funds ? are tapped
out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up
to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come
your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be
the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the
investors? upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.

If we are
going to be spending billions of taxpayer dollars, it can?t only be on
office-decorating bankers, over-leveraged home speculators and auto
executives who year after year spent more energy resisting changes and
lobbying Washington than leading change and beating Toyota.