I understand completely the logic behind attaching any and all kinds of strings to the bailout money. It could also include more conventional (though far from uncontroversial) measures such as becoming the shareholders of all these companies (with complete voting rights), for example. I just fear that a) the executive pay is an additional intervention, two wrongs as well as punishing the earlier wrong of the bailout, originally; and b) this will be viewed as a precedent for more intervention without any bailout or other rationale, or a lesser rationale, in the future.

In General, the nation was screwed because in General, business leaders are self centered jackasses. Therefore we must make laws and regulation, that in General, prevent or deter THESE PEOPLE Generally in control of our General economy.

The government should have little if any say over companies that play by the rules and succeed on their own merits. The companies we are talking about are a different story – they accepted government funds to rescue them from failure. They thought they could take our money and still play by the same rules, with no strings attached. IMO they should be under significant restrictions for some time, and that should include executive compensation.

I agree with you on the auto bailout by the way. The government should not be involved in rescuing bad companies.

* * *

“so much for”

… Among the immature or dishonest, or those over their head, but that's not my problem.

so much for any semblance of serious commentary

To AS, slippery slope arguments are bogus arguments. It isn't true that the rules move an inch, and boom, eveything slides in an inevitably bad direction. Every movement is debated. Every inch is contested. Law, rules, etc are all about drawing lines.

These companies accepted govenment cash to stay afloat. They sold their souls, and now they need to pay. That puts the incentives in the correct direction. For all the hand-wringing about moral hazards from the right, you simultaneously hear howling about protecting the poor CEO's who were forced to take that government money. That is ridiculous. If you don't want the moral hazard, then you should be supporting every effort to make the lives of the executives who made this decision pure misery. Make it so they would rather do ANYTHING than be bailed out by the government.

Final note: “Pay the price” is satisfied by repaying the bailout funds (at which point there is no more basis for argument in favor of federal controls of any kind contemplated or now initiated). All that would require is additional corporate income taxes to satisfy this (or separate payments, which might or might not be tax deductible; making them deductible would be controversial), or the equivalent of “garnishment” applied to these companies, taken directly out of gross receipts, accounts receiveable, or (a bureaucrat's dream) suitable (and documented, and throughly processed) direct payments to Washington instead of to the companies by major creditors and customers, ordinarily paying the companies instead.

The problem is that it's the devil we're talking about, the real issue, and the devil may not stop here. Putting un-American slavery-like conditions on these specific companies, bailout recipients, is both technically and logically defensible, at least in a vacuum. This already has been exploited by typical low-IQ populist demagoguery, that “the people” (as in “People's Republic,” which is neither), as “owners” of these companies, have the right to so direct the companies. Actually, it's more down-to-earth, in reality: the federal government bailed them out, and has the right to impose conditions on these companies in exchange, as a real shareholder if not merely as a “symbolic” [gag] shareholder by nature of the bailout commitment (gift!). Note that this introduces itself another slippery slope, indeed, something that has been a controversy for years, already. Any federal assistance therefore, confers such rights on the federal government, to make any and all kinds of decisions about operating the recipients of this kind of assistance. And, of course, it's not limited to this kind of assistance, but to financial aid of any kind, as has been argued about education — and it even involves the case of indirection, that this applies even if the institutions themselves aren't direct recipients of aid but at least one of their students is (or any single employee of a business, or even a customer, by the same logic in the business world!). This makes anyone involved indirectly with anybody receiving federal aid of any kind, which can include federal welfare payments (including Social Security disability or Medicaid if only true “relief” is an issue), or extended to subsidies or any kind of assistance — or could be as easily extended theoretically to include anybody receiving any federal benefit payments of any kind (anyplace that the elderly visit or patronize, for example — Social Security and Medicare), or could be theoretically extended to include anyone receiving any federal funds or benefits from them, which means any federal citizens or people not citizens but benefiting from them. And in fact it could be an extension of civil rights law logic (beyond hate crimes and other thought-crimes and political approaches to behavioral control) to everybody simply for being in the USA.

That's where the slippery slope, which obviously exists, leads, complete with its rationalization or claimed pretexts, right there before everyone, if they are intellectually competent and they are honest.

Few of us have such sympathy. Nor do we have sympathy for the Detroit automakers and their self-directed failure over more than a generation (even many people here in Detroit metro, partial to local or state sides on some issues, have been frequently critical of the auto companies, executives, and the UAW on the local radio programming), but those of us who grasp the real issues and have a properly moral stance on them object even more than the to the bailout, to the federal takeover and the federal command and control there (including the firing of Wagoner, whom many conveniently used as an example of Detroit's failure, personified, by the federal “overseers”). Many proceeded to remark that they were concerned that the company wouldn't be managed to run a profit, but would be a play-pen for petty dictators and silly environmentalists and their related policy games.

In this case however I have very little sympathy for the executives of these companies, or the companies themselves. When they accepted bailout money they accepted all the strings that came attached, and those strings should be considerable. This should be the Doomsday option for a company, not business as usual. It's perfectly appropriate to limit salaries in this situation. These companies sold their souls to the devil and should pay the price.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/16/weekinreview/…

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/62507/

Pizzigati is well-known here in the USA (I have his book on the subject), but it's known elsewhere, too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/aug/06/…

“Varley is fond of using the example of footballers pay to defend bank bonuses. But football managers get sacked. Varley himself earned more than £1m as the banking system crashed around him in 2008. Time to blow for a foul and show a maximum-wage card to those bringing the economic game into disrepute.”

http://neftriplecrunch.wordpress.com/2009/08/07…

Can't speak for AR, but I'm not going to bat for anyone. It is simply important, in my view, not to generalize but rather to treat people with equal respect and recognize their individuality. Of course, the people you are talking about exist, but they are not the entire class of corporate executives or law firms or accountants or lobbyists that you want to suggest.

Why do you find it necessary to have a defined class of enemies? How does that help?

It is indeed the slippery slope argument, and it is a valid argument to make. If you reject that that even exists, then you really are burying your head in the sand from the lessons of the history of ever expanding government power and control, and from the obvious desire of this administration to directly micromanage and control the economy.

The issue I have with your reply can be summed up in two words that you used, “these people.”

Law firms, lobbyists, accounting firms, corporate executives are not “these people”. “They” are not monolithic, but rather individuals with varying goals, social awareness, public conscience.

I'll speak personally to make my point. In the course of chairing one of the largest national health charities in the US, I have had the opportunity to meet and work with many of “these people”. Some were nasty bits of work, but just some. My contacts included CEO's from such varied industries as major commercial airlines, oil and gas, telecommunications, information and entertainment, high tech, global shipping and packaging, paper products, financial, automotive, real estate development and God knows who I am forgetting. We also had, and still have, a full time lobbying office in D.C. to advance government funded research, and law firms around the country as well as accounting firms to audit books.

Here's an interesting bit. To the extent I found narcissists along the way, some though not all came from the liberal wing of the entertainment industry. But, what I really found was that “these people” were individuals, each unique in his or her own right.

It isn't us against “these people”. We're all in a mess together. And many of “these people” are precisely the ones we need to help find solutions. We should be looking for ways to work together to problem solve rather than adopting an “us against them” approach. Just my view.

Sounds like government, and the typical big-city situation like Chicago.

What Hartmann has said before, related to this topic, that has been interesting (better demagoguery) has been to replace complaints about the “service economy” or its bubble-brain recent replacement, “information economy” with “finance economy,” i.e., involving a vast army of parasitic money-movers or paper-handlers.

As to the pay issue, obviously it's a disastrous and sinister precedent for the federal government to claim and then exercise the right to command pay levels. What other pay edicts will come next, and other business policy or conduct edicts will come next, won't, or I should say these days given lefty levels of thought, shouldn't be surprising. (Nor should be federal officials rather than just their approval of new officials, on boards of directors, and later managers; nor should be federal corporate charters in addition to vast new regulations by ObamaCo in addition to any actual laws passed by Congress, many of which will exploit envy and resentment among many libs and Dems, including the Still Obamaniac Faithful.)

Even on left-media sources like CNN the word already is out that institutions other than those subject to these pay commands are openly planning to poach people, who could easily get twice as much (if not more) pay elsewhere once these pay regs go into effect.

Agreed, but given the access to the power and influence enjoyed by these people as compared to the vast majority of the electorate, (think law firms, lobbyists, accounting firms, etc.) I suspect your concerns aren't terribly warranted.