Your money or your democracy: it's the most privileged industries that demand protection.

AuthorWelch, Matt
PositionFrom the Top

"WE'RE MORE worthy of a bailout than the jokers on Wall Street," Jason Whitlock wrote in The Kansas City Star just before the annus bailoutus of 2008 wound to a close.

The "we" in this case wasn't Detroit's Big 2.5 automakers, or the country's 39 or so governors running budget deficits, or even plucky nonprofits that fund school crossing guards, though certainly all these and many more have made the same argument during the last several months of envious Wall Street bashing. No, Jason Whitlock is a sports columnist who covers collegiate athletics for a big-city newspaper. Like many members of the privileged minority that has workplace access to a large printing press, Whitlock used it this winter to fret that unless Washington or some other higher power intervenes quickly in professional journalism's oldest medium, tyranny will be right around the corner. "You can't have a democracy without us" he warned. "If newspapers are dying, so is our system of government."

Legacy-media journalists may be the most irritating special pleaders when times get rough (which, for them, has been at least every day since I got into the business), but they're hardly alone. Our noble farmers, the breadbasket of America, need tens of billions annually to help provide "food security" against foreign hordes of dastardly sugar producers. Ever-shrinking steel plants provide the iron core of our threatened industrial base (which actually was growing like gangbusters until late 2008, but never mind) and so require tariffs from "dumping" countries such as comparatively impoverished Poland. Airlines are our first defense against murderous hijackers, so here's $18.6 billion for your troubles and a hideously consumer-punishing regulation preventing foreign-owned airlines from offering domestic flights. And all these examples predate the financial crisis of 2008, though they foreshadowed how a feckless Republican president would respond.

And our allegedly feckful new president? Don't get him started. "The auto industry is the backbone of American manufacturing" Barack Obama said just days after winning the presidency. "I have made it a high priority for my transition team to work on additional policy options to help the auto industry adjust, weather the financial crisis, and succeed in producing fuel-efficient cars here in the United States of America." When the lame-duck Congress later narrowly voted down a bailout package for Detroit automakers, and lame-duck President...

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