Team Ownership

Reading through the morning's headlines, and having gotten past the obituaries (where I usually start, in the hopes of reading something that might make my day) and back to the headlines, I observed that Mr. Most High, through his various underlings, commenced with placing limitations on the salaries that Americans are allowed to earn. Salary Czar Ken Feinberg has established that the maximum salary that can be earned by most workers at what are now government-subsidized banks and automakers (notably GM, AIG, and Citigroup) can no longer receive cash compensation exceeding $500,000 a year.

This is not really that surprising, as capping salaries is the dark underbelly of entitlement culture.

Generally speaking, salaries are what they are based on demands of the market: cheap labor is cheap for a reason, and professional help is expensive because it requires a skilled professional. Real easy to decide to place limits on what a person can earn when you've never met them, don't know how hard they've worked to get to where they are, and never-mind that you yourself would probably be incapable of understanding what they do, much less do it yourself. Take professional athletes as the halcyon example. Alex Rodriquez really doesn't seem to work all that hard for his millions, does he? But that fact that he doesn't seem to work hard is irrelevant in light of a simple supply and demand consideration: there is only one guy on the planet that can do the things he can do, and that guy's name is Alex Rodriquez. The market has set a price for retaining his skill-set, based on levels of demand. By doing what he does - which nobody else can do - he EARNS his money, with his own skill and industry.

That's how a free market works: prices are set by market considerations, with demand establishing price, and where skilled, industrious, capable workers earn more and move up by dint of being better, and in more demand than their fellows. Where earning and lifestyle are based on the capability of the worker, such worker's earnings and lifestyle are limited only the capabilities of the worker.

But when lifestyle is dictated from On High based on 'entitlement,' those pesky groundings in reality go away. Rather, we profess morality and arbitrary determinations dressed as 'fairness,' where the expressed goal is to provide a 'minimum standard' of living. To 'balance the playing field.' Which is a total crock of shit socially and realistically, since no amount of boosts and reassurances can make different people equal. Yes, God and the law weigh us all equally. But bosses don't, and with good reason: all employees are not equal. This is a point which the Left feels it tantamount to blasphemy to express, since it's 'unfair' and 'immoral.' But the bottom line is that disparate salaries exist for a reason, and that reason is economic, not political. The failure to recognize the primacy of economics over idealism has always been, and will always be, the greatest shortcoming of the liberal mind.

This placing of salary caps is the backlash of this divorcing decisions from economics. Of course the government feels entitled to place these caps. They have the right because the government effectively owns these companies. And they have no problems justifying the decision as made in the interest of 'fairness.' What is it that those people do that really entitles them to more than $500,000 a year? Their work can't be that difficult! Not only is it justifiable to cut those salaries, it's practically a moral imperative!

Perfectly reasonable to a liberal. Again, when lifestyle is dictated from On High based on morality and arbitrary determinations dressed as 'fairness,' the expressed goal is to provide a 'minimum standard' of living. To 'balance the playing field. But when lifestyle is dictated from On High based on morality and arbitrary determinations dresses as 'fairness,' salaries no longer need have any relation to the skill, expertise, or industry of the job or the person doing the job. The end result is salaries being divorced from the capabilities of the worker, which is after all the goal of the entitlement mindset.

But raise your hand if you think this represents a sound economic precedent?

What this salary cap means is that the best and the brightest at these business - where there is no longer even the pretense that they are separate from the Federal government - are going to leave and go work for the competition. The chairs they fill at GM and Citigroup also exist at competing businesses, and it's only the government-owned ones that have these restrictions. This will necessarily create an economic trend: the best and the brightest will follow the higher salaries to other companies. The government-owned companies will then need to fill the chairs with the relative dregs of the candidates. They will lose their best employees to the competition, from whom they will inherit the worst employees. With the end result that the government-owned industries will have a substantial talent deficit in relation to their business competition.

Take the Baltimore Orioles, for instance. They get whipped on EVERY YEAR. Why? Because the teams they compete against (Yankess, Red Sox, etc.) spend a lot more on salaries, both on management and in filling the worker positions. The competition therefor has a hell of a lot more talent. From the top down, Baltimore is second-rate as a business entity. Feel free to substitute any of the Oakland Raiders, the Golden State Warriors, or the Minnesota Wild in place of the Orioles, but the ends result is simple: Congratulations, citizens, your taxdollars were and are being spent to subsidize the Baltimore Orioles of the banking and automotive markets.

The really funny part about all this is that the salary caps are not universal, as they do not apply to the top-25 earners, either at GM or at Citigroup. Merely to the 26th on down. Those at the top can still make millions. Which should surprise nobody who has been paying attention. If you have even the slightest doubt about Barack Obama having sold his soul and this country out to the benefit of his personal friends (not businesses or special interests, but INDIVIDUALS), read this article. Because all those guys in the (salary-cap exempt) top 25 at the big firms? Those are the limousine liberals that are playing the Obama administration like a harp.

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?