Consider that number, $283. Not a bad little chunk of change. Three months of a really good DirecTV package. A new 16 GB iPod Touch, with your friend’s employee discount. Ten rounds apiece at the 4Ps with three of your pals, tax and tip included. Cross-country airplane flight. Swank new American-made leather jacket from US Wings. (Maybe on sale. Those things have gone up.)
And you’re about to spend $283 – you and every other person in this country – so that AIG can get off the hook.
That’s $85 billion. That’s more than Warren Buffett has. That’s enough money to buy the entire NFL, all 32 teams, and start cleaning house.
Back to the old “moral hazard” again. Bear Sterns. IndyMac. Fannie and Freddie. Now AIG is the latest corpse to get stood upright and paraded around on this month’s version of Weekend At Bernanke’s. Almost makes you want to ask who the hell Lehman pissed off that they didn’t get the complimentary reach-around.
When you have a market where everything is a game of musical chairs, but nobody ever takes a chair away, that’s not capitalism, that’s not conservatism, that’s fucking socialist. And the free pass is being handed out courtesy of the same people who went apoplectic at the suggestion that credit card interest should be capped somewhere around 30%, because it would undermine personal responsibility.
However, if you exist above the Whiffle Line, you’re far too important to ever bear the consequences of your actions. So stand by to have an iPod plucked from your wallet so that a bunch of gold-plated weasels can keep putting their name on Man U’s shirts. The very least they could do is round up their executive team, march them out at halftime of the Super Bowl, randomly select one or two, and let five lucky taxpayers go to work on ’em with steel-toes and a ball bat.
Not likely, obviously. They’re far too rich and important for silly shit like accountability.