'Corporate Welfare Queens'

This article is being retweeted quite a bit, so -- although it's in today's links -- it seems I probably should have done more to highlight it:

Corporate Welfare Queens, by James Surowiecki: Mitt Romney ... assails people on Medicaid and Social Security, and those who receive the earned-income tax credit, for being “dependent upon government”... Romney has had strikingly little to say about another prominent group that’s “dependent upon government”: the many American companies whose profits rely, in one form or another, on government assistance. ...

Corporate welfare isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some of these giveaways arguably do a lot of good. But companies that benefit from these policies are just as dependent on the government as the guy who gets the earned-income tax credit. And, when Romney concentrates his fire on the latter rather than on the former, it makes you wonder if his problem isn’t with government assistance per se, but only with government assistance to poor and working people. Romney may say that he wants small government, but what he’s pushing for is a government that’s small when it comes to helping people and big when it comes to helping business. 

Republicans portray their objections to spending on social insurance as part of a more general objection to government involvement in the private sector. They're supposedly the anti-government party despite their willingness to use the heavy hand of government when it suits their purposes (e.g on social issues). But it seems to me their objection is really about who they see as the deserving and the undeserving. They beleive that corporations deserve the help they get, for the most part, while the members of 47%, for the most part, do not. To me, that's backwards.