Isn’t is funny that the man who says that he’s “not interested in running GM” even while he determines where they can and cannot have their headquarters, and whose administration is “doesn’t want to place caps on executive pay” has just appointed a compensation czar?
How much more surreal can this administration get?
Kenneth Feinberg has just assumed the responsibility of dictating wage controls at private companies that received (sometimes against their own will) tax payer money. On the one hand this is in response to the outrage many in the public felt at the outsized compensation of certain AIG and Wall Street execs which the administration glad joined, though they knew of it all along. On the other hand, is it really any of our business how much money the guy down the street pays someone to mow his lawn?
The Wall Street Journal puts it this way:
The U.S. “market” economy took another hard-to-believe turn this week with the Obama Treasury appointing a “compensation czar” to dictate wage controls on private companies that take taxpayer money and offer guidelines for every other U.S. publicly traded company. Can wage and price controls for everyone be far behind?
The Treasury says that’s not what it has in mind, but then much of what government has done in the past eight months would have been scoffed at even a year ago. Richard Nixon disavowed wage and price controls right up until the time he imposed them in 1971. The Obama Administration is hardly restrained as a matter of principle against such brute government force, and if prices start rising after our current Great Reflation, well, you read the warning here first.
The analogy of the guy paying the kid to mow his lawn may seem stretched, but it is only a small step removed from what Obama and the liberal power mongers are doing. You see when we feel like we have a right to be outraged over how much a private company pays someone, then we really are sticking our nose where it doesn’t belong. None of us feel as if we need to justify how much we pay the gangly teenager mowing our lawn just because we happen to receive a federal mortgage interest deduction (another form of receiving taxpayer compensation might I add) and neither should a private company, no matter how large.
The human impulse that is being exploited here is a base one: envy, and such envy is the lifeblood of leftism. Envy that someone else has more and that they have because they have some how exploited, robbed, or conned their way into it. And so we view it as quite appropriate that faceless corporations should be hounded and shamed and legal constrained from paying whatever they want to pay because we are envious. Envy is a sad sick thing. And in this case, it is just one more tool for Obama to initiate a power grab.
The Truth in Black and Right 