This A Surprise?

Today's Sacramento Bee has a story on the benefits received by Warren Buffet, the dean of the capitalist class. Sure enough, he has made scads of money investing in the beneficiaries of the taxpayers largesse. Indeed it might be suggested that Berkshire Hathaway has been saved not by Buffet's investing acumen, but by the welfare provisions of the TARP.

But this shouldn't be is a surprise to anyone. The history of the United States is littered with bailouts of the rich at the expense of the rest of us. We can look back on Alexander Hamilton's refinancing of the national debt after the Revolutionary War, the government's assumption of the debts of the railroad magnates...to find that, more often than not, the welfare payments to the rich were many times what's been provided to all the single mothers with children in the history of the country.

And Buffet is no different than his predecessors at the public trough in proclaiming that what's good for him is good for the country. What's depressing is that we seem not to have learned to recognize it for the hogwash it is.