by Michael Daly

Created on: March 27, 2009

The recent outcry over executive bonuses stems from the financial meltdown of AIG and bonuses recently paid out to executives. It served as a convenient scapegoat for Congress to suddenly pose as champions of the people and opponants of greed, and all the other nonsense that is used by Congress and by proponants of government meddling in the economy to justify such meddling.

But the realities involved make the outcry absurd. The recent bonuses had been agreed to nearly a year before the recent outcry, and lost in the outcry is that most of those receiving bonuses were NOT invovled in bankrupting the company; on the contrary, many of those receiving bonuses had fought former AIG leader Joe Cassano in his rise to the top of the company and in his leap into the varied economic risks that led to disaster for AIG. As writer Tom MaGuire has pointed out, Cassano's rivals could have chosen to stay in AIG offices in Tokyo, New York, etc. or elect to leave, and some stayed, and it made no sense to punish executives of AIG who stayed to try and pick up the pieces of Joe Cassano's failures.

It is also worth noting that AIG got swept into the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae disasters that were entirely caused by government meddling, where government was paying banks to make bad loans. They are now being asked to be punished by Democrats who make up the rules as they go.

Government meddling in the market caused the financial meltdown that is scaring a lot of politicians and a lot of people in the Mainstream Media, and if one should be outraged about executive bonuses that were earned long beforehand and in fact met with Congressional approval, then far geater outrage is waranted for Congress, whose own bonuses are by no means trivial and whose own economic power is far greater than that of AIG or any other economic entity. The meddling has to stop and the persecution of the market has to stop.

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