Oops

The headline reads: "Report: White House tried to rush Solyndra loan"

The reason: "so that Vice President Joe Biden could announce its approval at the September 2009 opening of the California company’s factory, the emails obtained by the Washington Post reveal."

The problems:

1. “We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of
occasions,” one OMB official wrote to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, adding, “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.”
2. In another email, an OMB official expressed concern that the model being used to assess the financial risk to taxpayers was not optimal, but that there wasn’t time to change it. “Given the time pressure we are under to sign-off on Solyndra, we don’t have time to change the model,” the staffer wrote.
3. An OMB official asked that the announcement be postponed, writing in an email, “I would prefer that this announcement be postponed. … This is the first loan guarantee and we should have full review with all hands on deck to make sure we get it right.”
4. “This deal is NOT ready for prime time,” wrote an OMB staffer nine days before the announcement of the loan, in an email obtained by ABC News.
5. In fact, one OMB reviewer pointed out that a credit-rating agency predicted that the project would run out of cash in September 2011.
6. Corporatism "But Democrats have a message of their own: The Republicans backed the California solar company too...Lobbyists with tight GOP connections helped the clean technology start-up company headed by a registered Republican."

The result: Solyndra closed its doors on the last day of August, leaving taxpayers on the hook for over half a billion dollars.

The solution: The federal government has no business making loans nor loan guarantees to companies that have massive technology and/or execution risks no matter how good the intentions seem to be. The use of public funds for private investments is not good policy.

I've said it before and will say it again: when the government decides to spend/"invest" other people's money, it does so for political reasons. If the project fails, the typical response is "more money is needed" (e.g. education, infrastructure, defense). However, throwing money into a broken system will not fix the system.

When the private sector spends or invests their own money, it does so for economic reasons. If it fails, creative destruction occurs. Capital is set free to flow to its most productive use and the evolution continues.

I'll take the private sector approach any day over the government approach.