Investors in a corporation collectively own it. They elect board members who are supposed to look after their interests. The board appoints executives, pays them, and can fire them. When the government gave all that taxpayer money to those banks we became stockholders - partial owners of them. That's how the system works when individuals or companies invest money into a corporation and there's no Fundamental Law of Economics that makes it different for governments. As owners, we should now get votes on who to hire as executives, which ones to fire, and how much to pay them. That's how corporations work.

I am so sick of hearing that we shouldn't influence how the bank executives are compensated and who gets fired. We're investors in these banks, that's what investors get to do! I do think that in principle it is better for the government to regulate markets rather than the affairs of individual companies. That is why I only support the government buying chunks of companies when their failure would be catastrophic. The upshot of this is that when the situation warrants our doing so it also warrants us having a say on the board.

IN SUMMARY: if the banks screwed up so badly that they needed a government bailout than they also screwed up so badly that they forfeited their right to run themselves independently from us, their new owners.