A simple analogy.

You have a college-age kid, going to a state school. He/she should be attending all their classes, doing their homework, working a job to help support the costs of attending, and being a responsible adult.

Oh who are we kidding? This is America.

In reality, as most parents have encountered, your college-age kid is barely attending half of their classes, probably blowing off their homework to attend parties, drink, use drugs, have sex, doesn’t have a job or didn’t bother to show up, and is irresponsible. Yet in a day and age where the parents credibility and face towards family, friends, and society must be maintained, they continue to pay for and subsequently prop up their young adult child.

Now this may be a crude analogy of sorts, it is not as if every college kid does this, and I am certainly not saying that there are college kids that do party but get their work done, but for the sake of this comparison, we’re going to run with what I’ve wrote.

AIG, and many other recipients of taxpayer money, are the shining example of the college kid gone wrong, but our federal government, eager to save face to the rest of the world, continues to prop these companies up despite the fact that they continue to hemorrhage money, while other banks and institutions, many of whom didn’t take the risks and irresponsibility, were allowed to die. Our government certainly has a Darwinism sense of humor.

I realize that this economy, the decisions made in the past by public and private people, companies, and organizations, and many other factors contributed to these companies’ struggles, it would be unfair of me to label a company such as AIG of being completely at fault, but I have to rather agree to a degree with Democrats and some Republicans who have called them out on their outrageous bonuses being paid to executives for failure.

It has been argued in the past that the government should not have their hands in how companies choose to pay their employees and managers. I agree with this. Private business is private business, companies only answer to their shareholders. But when your company sinks so low as to have to accept government bailouts to support themselves, the game changes. Suddenly now you are at the mercy of lawmakers, and the taxpayers of this country, to pay that money back, or die trying. You cannot possibly sit there and preach private business when you didn’t even entertain the notion of restructuring, cutting costs, or outright filing for bankruptcy. Instead, you wanted to continue spending the same budget and more money, on someone else’s money, or pay off old debts with borrowed money. Isn’t that what Madoff did?

I am impressed that we as a society have started to turn back around into a more fiscally responsible society, largely due to the times, but also due in part to the fact that we’ve begun to realize that the fabled American dream is more than just personal wealth, but it is also about life, love, and happiness. There is no easy street, and watching Wall Street, corporate executives, hedge-fund managers, stock holders, and everyone who has profited off the last decade and a half fall as a result, has renewed many people’s sense of responsiblity towards themselves and their families. We will emerge from this recession eventually, and when we do, we hopefully will take away from this with the same hard learned lessons our grandparents and great-grandparents did from The Great Depression, and that is no matter how high and how big something is, it all can fall down, no matter what.

As for the irresponsible college kid? Perhaps our liberal-minded colleges can answer that one better than I.