Well sometimes things don't work out and a large problem is the fact that the US allows importation of cheaper goods from China from companies that are funded by the state there.
The idea was good, the overall implementation bad.
Yes, sometimes things don't work out, but when the money you play around with is not yours then you are not as careful with it as a private investor would be. Fact is that Solyndra could not get investment from the private sector, that means that no private investor thought that the company was worth investing in. What magic insight do bureaucrats have that allows them to bet against the market?
The idea was a disaster from the start. If you can get something cheaper from elsewhere then that is a good thing, as you can put your own resources to better use. It is cheeper for my family to buy food than it would be to produce it ourselves. The logic applies when looking at a country's economy as a whole.
On the other side of the coin, government intervention following the credit crisis actually saved 100,000s of jobs in the auto industry and other industries in the US and almost all the money has already been paid back at a net profit to the taxpayer!
This is not correct. there has been absolutely no profit from all the bail outs in the US.
GM is still majority owned by the US taxpayer, but GM as a company has not changed one bit since it was bailed out, so it is just going to go bust again, shares are already down 35% since the IPO. If the auto industry had not been bailed out then those jobs would not have disappeared. When companies go into bankruptcy they do not vanish from the earth, they are sold off whole or in parts to companies that can do a better job at managing the resources.
The bailouts of the financial industry were even worse. Yes the money directly lent to companies has been returned, but what no politician is willing to factor in is all the toxic debt that the FED bought ($1.25tr). This is held on balance sheet with the par value, not the market value, as there is essentially no market value for them, i.e. they are worth 0.
So be careful reading commentaries from the US as they usually have a political slant rather than a balance viewpoint.
The commentary I pointed to is based on basic economics, something that is never correctly represented in commentary about the bailouts. Your argumentation is that if the government had not bailed out the auto industry then thousands of jobs would have been lost, i.e. absent the government "investment" these jobs would have gone. But this completely ignores the fact that government has no money of its own, it takes it out of the productive economy. So that means that the money "invested" in the auto industry is money that was not invested by the private sector, so there is no net gain!