Nasim Taleb on the need for individual business failure

For the economy to be antifragile and undergo what is called evolution, every single individual business must necessarily be fragile, exposed to breaking - evolution needs organisms (or their genes) to die when supplanted by others, in order to achieve improvement, or to avoid reproduction when they are not as fit as someone else.  Accordingly, the antifragility of the higher level may require the fragility - and sacrifice - of the lower one.

[...]

Now, by disrupting the model, as we will see, with bailouts, governments typically favor a certain class of firms that are large enough to require being saved in order to avoid contagion to other business.  This is the opposite of healthy risk-taking; it is transferring fragility from the unfit to the collective.

~ Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder, pp. 74-75