No other industry affected by the pandemic received more from the government. There was no special program for hotels or restaurants or travel agencies. Companies in those industries had to line up for the small business-focused Paycheck Protection Program and pray. …. The question isn’t whether airline employees should have been helped, it’s whether airline shareholders should have been.

The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, writing this week about how he believes the U.S. has “socialized an industry’s losses and privatized its profits” with its assistance to airlines, in the DealBook column, “Were the Airline Bailouts Really Needed?”