Hostess is dead. The bakery company stopped production in November, and has been trying to sell off its divisions since. Lucky for folks like Twinkie-obsessed Tallahassee, played by Woody Harrelson in Zombieland (2009), the much-beloved synthetic pastries may again appear in stores this summer.
And not as a zombie product, but as the real, edible confection we’ve known all our lives.
How? Not through any demented reanimation or infection process. This has nothing to do with zombies.
Instead, it has everything to do with the normal workings of capitalism:
In a joint bid, Metropoulos & Co and Apollo Global Management are paying $410m (£275m) for the bankrupt company.
The offer had originally been planned to set the floor for an auction, which Hostess boss Greg Rayburn had predicted would be “wild and woolly.”
In fact, a court filing showed that no other offers were submitted.
In America, today, it’s still possible for bankrupt companies to sell off their productive capacity — including names, recipes, logos and the like — to meet the debts prioritized by the courts.
The latter is entirely natural, not Zombieland-horrific.
Much of the hysteria over “too big to fail” comes from misunderstanding the nature of the deaths of once-successful businesses. Laid-off workers can and do find new work as more efficient companies step in, and the capital goods of a bankrupt company can still have value, and can be bought and re-employed more efficiently in other companies.
Indeed, keeping inefficient firms going by subsidy and special favor puts them into a zombielike existence — not the Zombieland re-animated dead kind, but pre-Romero, old-fashioned voodoo zombies. These sluggards serve slowly and creepily.
Better acclimate ourselves to capitalism’s “circle of life” than the horrorshow that is “too big to fail” in the United States of Zombiel… Bailouts.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
A hard working laborer, I was told, fancied working by candlelight. He had calculated that, during his vigil, he burned a 4-penny candle, earning 8 pennies by his work. A tax on tallows and another on the manufacture of the candles increased by 5 pennies the cost of his luminary, which became thus more expensive than the value of the product that it could shed light upon. From then on, as soon as night fell, the workman remained idle; he lost the 4 pennies which his work could obtain him, and without the tax service perceiving anything out of this production. Such a loss must be multiplied by the number of the workmen in a city and by the number of the days of the year.