In 1981 President Ronald Reagan took an enormous chance that delivered enormous benefits for his administration and its core beliefs. He broke the airline controllers’ union.

Unions had been losing a lot of power and membership for years before this, but the controllers’ encounter seemed to be a unique situation. Airline controllers felt that had an unbeatable hand. Their union was small but its members seemed indispensable. What could the country do, after all, if there were no air travel because there was no one to land planes at the airport?

So the union went out on strike. And Reagan fired them en masse. Instead of causing air travel to come to halt, however, military controllers were brought in, airport management worked overtime, and new controllers were trained at an accelerated pace.

These days we have another union whose members think they are indispensable. These people don’t belong to a formal union organization, and at first glance even appear to be competitors with one another. They nonetheless share a self-serving collective interest as strong as the airline controllers, and like controllers in 1981 are absolutely convinced that their own skills and services are so irreplaceable that no government official can bring them to heal.

They are the arrogant, overpaid, ferociously entitled executives and traders at Wall Street firms.

The scandal over bonuses for the AIG executives who ruined their company and almost brought down the entire financial system is the most flagrant recent example of these people’s attitude. But it is equally on view in many ways at virtually every Wall Street firm getting a government bail out. The attitude comes down to this: the government has no right to control our managerial practices; and even if they did, it would be highly destructive to the public interest to limit our compensation because this would cause the most talented, the best and brightest Wall Street lights to leave their jobs at firms that get government money.

Both of these arguments are nonsense.

Companies that get outside sources of funding either from stockholders or lenders are always beholden to these fund providers and always must accommodate their demands. If a public company doesn’t do what its shareholders want, its stock price plummets. If it doesn’t do what its lenders want, it can’t sell its bonds or get other loans.

If the government now provides funds to Wall Street firms, either by buying stock or lending money, by Wall Street’s own long-established, well accepted standards it has a perfect right to demand compensation limits on company executives.

But what about the argument that a limit of $500,000 per annum in compensation for top executives (a new government rule) will drive the best, most experienced business leaders to leave the firm and go elsewhere? Outside of a miniscule clique of self proclaimed best and brightest, this notion is also flagrantly absurd. Maybe $500,000 is chump change to these people, but its damn good money for 99.9 percent of the population, including a great many highly talented Wall Street people who would be more than willing to earn that much while the government is a major financial backer of their company—which will only be temporary in any case.

Also, while its currently fashionable to damn all top Wall Street executives, the really best and brightest ones know that this is a genuine crisis time and from purely patriotic motives they must put the public interest above their own financial gain. These same people have always said big paydays are only a way of counting and not their real motivation. Now they are called upon to count in a different way, and can step up to do the job for an appropriate wage or even go the dollar-a-year route. This is what some of them do anyway, when they enter government service as, say, Secretary of the Treasury?

As for a need for huge yearly bonuses to encourage good performance, such bonuses are a problem, not a solution. They simply encourage short-term tricks that lead to longer term disasters.

When it comes to the belief that the departure of bonus babies to firms that don’t get government money and hence don’t limit executives compensation will hurt the firms they leave, this is a red herring. Most of today’s investors don’t want to put their money with short-term oriented performers. They prefer a steady returns crowd that doesn’t invest OPM (other people’s money) in ways that merely feather their own nests.

Wall Streeters loved Ronald Reagan. So let’s give them a good dose of the Gipper and see who salutes. Let’s break the Wall Street union and re-create financial institutions that serve investors long-term interests, not the short-term greed of some Wall Street heavies.

The planes still take-off and land safely in our airports. Our markets will also perform quite well in a post-Wall Street union era.