Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway are capitalism at its best and worst | Dan Gillmor

There's no doubt Buffett and his business partner Charlie Munger are great investors, but they can also make you queasy

On May 4, thousands of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, accompanied by scores of journalists, will gather in an Omaha arena for the company's annual meeting. The event has become known as the the "Woodstock of capitalism" – a living shrine to Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett, widely regarded as the best investor of all time.

I've been a Berkshire shareholder since the late 1980s, and have followed Buffett's career with more than a casual interest. But I'd never attended an annual meeting until three years ago – in the depths of the Great Recession and at a time when Buffett's halo was showing some tarnish. What I saw and heard that weekend in 2010 was mostly enthralling but occasionally repellent.

Berkshire and Buffett are the face of modern capitalism at its best and worst, though the former greatly outweighs the latter. The company is a complex, sprawling collection of businesses and investments, vastly more successful than most. Buffett and his longtime (and under-appreciated by the general public) partner, Charlie Munger, are beyond brilliant as investors and overseers of a vast empire. They find what they consider great businesses and, with little interference, let the managers manage. They're in it for the long term; this makes them actual investors, in contrast with the speculators who populate and pollute much of Wall Street today.

Buffet, too, is enormously complicated, sometimes contradictory. He has earned enormous respect, but not the near-worship that characterizes so many shareholders' – and fawning journalists' – attitudes.

I deeply admire Buffett's common-sense approach to business and investing. Read his annual report, especially the entertaining and nuanced letter to shareholders, to get a feel for why.

Every year as I scour it, at least one new light bulb goes off in my head. He cheerfully admits when he screws up, as he did some years back after wrongly that deciding the airline industry made sense. (I expect a similar admission in a few years about his new hobby of scooping up newspapers, unless he's prepared to make radical – and necessary – changes in how they operate. Still, I wish us all well in this particular move).

For years, Buffett fretted loudly about the dangers Wall Street's financial engineering, especially its growing reliance on derivative "instruments" that spawned massive profits for a tiny few at the expense of so many others. These were, he accurately warned, "financial weapons of mass destruction". When the economy imploded in 2008, he was almost alone in having credibility as he reassured the public, and the teetering markets, that we could avoid a replay of the Great Depression.

I've been especially charmed by Buffett's ability to induce frothing nonsense from the denizens of the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages and their right-wing fellow travelers. They can't fathom a capitalist favoring policies that do anything but reward the rich and powerful, and they hold him in special contempt for his well-founded belief in a fair, progressive tax system including, "omigod", a stiff tax on inherited mega wealth. Unlike them, of course, Buffett understands the long-range folly of a system that's rigged to give the wealthy – and especially their heirs – overwhelming advantages, fueling a plutocracy that leads society down a cruel and ultimately unsustainable path. As he famously said in 2006:

"[T]here is class warfare, all right. But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war,