Add this reason to the list: people like Jonathan Alter of Newsweek now feel entitled to dictate how private companies should do business.
Alter?s latest column targets the $18 billion in financial industry bonuses that drew President Obama?s condemnation:
The final line of bonus defense, seriously presented to me last fall by an Obama adviser, is that restricting bonuses smacks of a “populism” that is unrelated to solving our severe economic problems.
Actually, $18 billion smacks of, well, $18 billion. That’s almost five times as much as we spend each year trying to cure cancer, which kills 500,000 Americans annually. It’s twice what’s in the stimulus for building mass transit, which creates thousands of jobs and cuts our dependence on foreign oil. The simplest thing would be for the banks to just collect the money back from their six-, seven- and eight-figure-income employees and lend it out to help get the economy moving again.
My first reaction to Alter?s complaint? Why does what ?we? spend on cancer cures have to do with what a private entity decides to do with the proceeds of its business? Then I realized that Alter now equates at least some private-sector business decisions with politically motivated government decisions because taxpayers have ?bailed out? these failing companies.
The solution is not to force businesses to make the same kind of poor decisions government makes. It?s to get government out of business decisions by keeping taxpayer money away from the private sector.
At least the column gives us a glimmer of hope that Alter?s employer has a better grasp of economics than he does:
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get a bonus this year.
Do you think that might have anything to do with the abundant supply of moderately talented, left-leaning scribes? If Newsweek has no problem finding someone to take Alter’s place, why bother paying him a bonus?
