All the righteous exasperation exhaled and partisan stink raised over "the government’s backing of Solyndra, which could cost taxpayers more than a half-billion dollars," is at its keenest amusement when Republicans suggest that such an enterprising debacle was merely typical, just typical, of the wholly unfamiliar, prodigiously unAmerican socialism of that suspicious Other, Barack Obama.
They've never seen anything like it, these Republican pols: all this weird, federal aid and unfunny intrusion into the holy Hayekian sanctuary of the free American marketplace. Oh God, oh dear God, what, in Heaven's name, hath Obama wrought?
Yet such abhorrence is permissible only if one is utterly ignorant of even the broadest swaths of American economic history. From Hamiltonian protectionism to Bushian Haliburtonism, the federal government has always acted either the silent or stentorian partner of the American businessman. Here, for instance, is just one chapter of federal largess through the ages, from Jack Beatty's particular Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900:
In granting land to railroads Congress bracketed off much of the map for private sale.... [T]he railroads would finance their construction by selling land along the railway corridor or borrowing against it. Until the early 1870s, the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, the Atlantic and Pacific, and the Texas and Pacific, as well as a scattering of smaller railroads, had received five times more land than homesteaders -- the Northern Pacific alone an area larger than New England.
Ah, yes, those were the days of Horatio Algerian corporate bootstraps and rugged individualism -- and humongous handouts.