[link|http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire071702.asp|The only remaining difference between big business and big government]
Excerpt:
Item: While senators and congressmen hyperventilate over accounting scandals in a handful of big corporations, the U.S. government itself squanders, wastes, loses, and misappropriates hundreds of billions without a blush. Congressional accounting is a joke, auditing is an entire comedy routine, and all government "budget" and "expenditure" figures, including any I may have quoted in this article, are science fiction. Corporate bosses who swindle their way into private fortunes while their companies go under, end up disgraced and/or in jail. The congressional crooks and shysters who hose public money into sinkholes like Haiti, farm subsidies, home-district pork projects or the Department of Education, go on to ever greater political triumphs, and eventually to colossal pensions and lucrative speaking engagements or prestigious academic posts.
On the other end of it, the people who invested in the companies that get looted by corrupt CEOs, did so voluntarily, in the hope of enriching themselves with no effort. When their hopes prove vain, they howl that they are victims, and the newspapers whine on their behalf about "defrauded shareholders." The people whose money goes into those government-favored sinkholes, by contrast, are taxpayers, who had the money torn from them under threat of legal penalties. When the horrible failure of government "investments" become too obvious even for lefty media stooges to ignore, the people who paid for it all without the option are chided for having greedily permitted themselves to be undertaxed.
I say:
What we need is equal opportunity outrage.