Remember that time Lois Lane sued Superman for saving her from the burning airplane? No? That’s because even in fiction, everybody knows it’s a jerkwad move to bring litigation against the hero who saved you from a fiery, horrific death. The world of high finance, however, is far more bizarre than fiction: The New York Times reports that AIG—which helped precipitate the nation’s 2008 financial meltdown with its own troubles—is considering joining a $25 billion shareholder lawsuit against the government. The shareholders claim that the government’s rescue—in which the feds sunk $182 billion of taxpayer money into the company and took a 92 percent stake, in order to prevent its collapse—amounted to a “taking” of their property without compensation. Left unmentioned is this: If the government hadn’t stepped in to rescue AIG, there wouldn’t have been any property to take: AIG would’ve collapsed and, more than it already did, taken the American economy with it—we’d now be living in a Mad Max-style post-apocalypse world of warrior tribes, feasting on the bones of the very bankers who got us into this mess. Given the threat of a lawsuit, maybe that was the way to go. [New York Times]