David Harsanyi, the Denver Post Libertarian and a Maureen Dowd Wannabe, has a column today complaining about CEO Pay Caps.
Here's his lead:
Many Americans would agree that executives who accepted government bailouts should be huddled around chipped Formica tables at the Wichita Super 8 conference room rather than congregating at plush Las Vegas retreats.
But is it possible to place our frustration with corporate tone-deafness aside and be mildly troubled by the rigorous control Washington has seized by feeding on the fears and bloodlust of terrified citizens?
Why did we just allow the president to dictate the pay of private citizens working in the private sector?
He's a clever writer, maybe too clever, but he's on the Denver Post Op-Ed page to counterbalance Mallard Filmore, I guess. I sent in a Letter to the Editor on this column, below, with some additional comments that would have been too long to get printed, wherein I compare our present economic situation to a famous airline crash....(see below for Wiki link)
You should read the entire column, linked above, to get a sense of how Harsanyi writes, and get a sense of what Libertarianism has come to here in the rockies. Here's my LTE (they print mine sometimes, but I think they're tired of me)
Let's dispense with the myth of the "free" market. "Free" can mean either free of regulation, or free of corrupting influences. The last 25 years have shown a distinct trend toward less regulation and an increase in corruption and greed. And how did the "Free" market respond? It went into oscillations, like an aircraft that has lost it's tail section, until it crashed. Like all "panics" in the 19th and early 20th century. You know, back before fiscal controls?
Pay Caps? The Stockholders are demanding them. That is, now that the government is a player in the organization, that corporation is no longer "free" to pay the CEO whatever it wants. If it wanted to be "free", maybe it shouldn't have corrupted and bankrupted itself. Regarding the previous free market (aka Voodoo Economics), rugged Ayn-Rand individualists like Alan Greenspan have had to admit that they were wrong, and economist Milton Friedman, himself a nobel laureate, clearly didn't understand the difference between the academic theory of supply side economics and its practical implementation. Like Alan Greenspan, he underestimated the lengths to which greedy, unprincipled people will go.
"Well, then, it is not a stimulus bill. It is a left wing omnibus bill to restructure the economy without much debate."
Guess what, we had that debate last Nov 4. People have figured out that supply side can't work without complex restraints, if it can work at all. Obama is consistently pointing out that the free-market, supply-siders and neo-con economics of disaster capitalism had their chance to show how to govern, and they failed. Big Time, as Cheney would say. The right is desperately trying to pretend that it was incompetence rather than fundamentally flawed ideology that crashed the world economy. Nice choice, there, when your best argument is that you're ONLY incompetent.
And, no one is proposing that the Stimulus must be only short term, except the right. They want to stop the bleeding, then get back to three years ago, where everyone on Wall Street was making a lot of money by cheating each other. That's the point - the economy must be restructured, both short and long term. Phantom financial instruments must go, and the creation of tangible goods must come back, and the middle class must be strengthened. The time is now.
The more I thought about it, and the need to make an understandable metaphor to people I meet who just throw up their hands and say "I just don't know what's going on in congress about the stimulus, or whatever it is", I thought of United Flight 232
Here's the rest of my thoughts not included in the letter:
And there's an analogy here. An Aircraft has wings and engines that hold it up and propel it forward (Capital and public faith). It has pilots and engineers to keep it pointed in the right direction and make sure the various pieces are working (President, Federal Reserve, Economists, congress). The tail section controls whether the plane goes up or down, left or right - it's the regulator. Remember United flight 232 from Denver, captained by Al Haynes and assisted by Dennis Fitch, which lost all its tail controls and crash landed in Sioux falls, SD. Almost half the people on board died - but more than half lived.
So now imagine an airplane where the wings are coming off because capital was misused, an engine fails because lobbyists sold the manufacturer a faulty engine, and the tail section no longer works because of corruption and insufficient regulation. And while the captain is struggling to figure out how to get to an airport without killing everyone, the first class section is complaining that there aren't enough tax cuts, that wall street bonuses are OK, that there should be no funding for the arts (Don't artists work, and spend money?), that the stimulus costs too much, that the flight engineer (Nobel laureate Paul Krugman?) is wrong, and that they refuse to help save the plane until each one gets to make a speach to the cabin-class passengers explaining why they aren't responsible for the last 8 years, even while the captain comes on the intercom and asks everyone in first class to sit down and STFU.
Well, Ladies and Gentleman, that aircraft, with we the people in back, is the US economy. Obama is the pilot, and if we're lucky maybe more than half of us will survive.
So maybe I'm trying too hard to get perspective on this, but I do find developing some analogy to what people's can relate helps to make a point. Wha'dya think?