Is anyone else bothered by the fact that one of the key tenets of the government’s plan to respond to the financial crisis involves merging failing firms into larger firms?  It has seemed to me that one of the problems of this crisis is that all these firms that we’ve been bailing out have been too big to fail.  Even Lehman Brothers, a company which Paulson thought wasn’t too big to fail, turned out to be too big to fail.  And now we’re encouraging troubled companies to merge — in some cases with other troubled companies — forming even larger companies.  It seems like we’re creating a future where the only companies that the government won’t save are the so-called “Main Street” businesses.