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The real answer, like the focal point of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” is right in front
of our eyes. We just have to discern it amid the clutter of daily living.
    Since 1980 it has become
official policy to ensure that the rich receive the benefits of government. This is a shift from government policy in the years after
World War II to grow the middle class, remaking America into a land of better-educated and healthier people, a land of suburbs and
single-family homes where opportunity was based less on status and wealth than on hard work and merit.
    So who is better off today than they were 30 years ago? The middle-aged factory worker whose plant closed
even though it earned a healthy profit or the Wall Street investment banker who brokered the deal to ship the machine tools
overseas, where pay is three or four dollars per day? The billionaire CEO or the middle manager whose company health insurance
has been cut yet again? The war contractor or the brain-injured veteran?
    Nearly three decades
after Mr. Reagan’s revolution, the single biggest piece of our economy, a third of it, is still government. From raking leaves in city
parks to buying stealth bombers that cost $2 billion a copy, government takes the same share. But money for the basics that make
society work is growing scarce. From those leaves in the park to textbooks to highway bridge maintenance to food safety
inspections, money is dwindling because so much has been diverted to the already rich through giveaways, tax breaks, and a host
of subsidies that range from the explicit to the deeply hidden.
    Evidence that the elites have
captured the government and are milking it for their own benefit is so overwhelming that, on one level, you can find it as an
unstated assumption in everyday news reports. With this idea in mind, the degree to which it has become part of the background to
our national political, economic, and social discussions will leap out at you from the pages of the newspapers and the
observations of the pundits. It has become the basis for advertisements about how buying a luxury home or a share of a corporate
jet may be within your reach, thanks to an assist from the government.
    In the pages ahead we
will examine just how thoroughly government has become the servant of the rich, showing how:
    Warren Buffett’s company has a
two-thirds-billion-dollar, interest-free loan from our government for more than 28 years, just one of
    many ways that the government has boosted the investment returns for
which he is so renowned.
    President George W. Bush
owes his fortune not to the oil business, at which he failed, but to a sales tax increase that was funneled into his pocket, a fortune
further enhanced by his paying millions less in income taxes than he should have.
    George Steinbrenner not only gets lavish subsidies for his baseball team, he also made a fortune from
a scheme that damaged national security.
    Paris Hilton has
resources to cavort shamelessly because her grandfather, thanks to government, snatched a fortune away from poor
children.
    Donald Trump benefits from a tax that was
enacted to help the elderly and the poor, but part of which is now diverted to his casinos.
    And beyond these brand-name Americans are legions of the superrich of whom few have heard, who owe
their fortunes less to their enterprise than to the generosity of our Uncle Sam and his nieces and nephews in state and local
government.
    There is a reason that 35,000 people are registered as lobbyists in Washington,
double the number of lobbyists employed there in 2000. They are there to seek favors, from outright gifts of your tax dollars to
subtle changes in rules that funnel money to their clients, thwart competition, hold you back, and buoy others. Among the ironies is
that many of the most damaging policies have been created in the name of Adam Smith, the original modern economist. Indeed, if
that eighteenth-century