Continued hypocrisy of the Obama administration
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The "pay czar" tasked by the U.S. government with ruling on the eye-popping compensation of some of Wall Street's top earners is far from a stranger to big paychecks and the trappings of wealth.
Kenneth Feinberg made $5.76 million last year as a partner in his Washington law firm, Feinberg Rozen LLP, according to a government ethics filing obtained by Reuters.
And his assets, which include a stake in his law firm, two homes and dozens of investments, are worth anywhere from $11 million to $37 million, according to the filing, which places assets in broad value categories.
His homes are a $1.66 million house in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, and a $1.96 million vacation home in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard.
Strangely, some people are taking solace at this revelation, rather than being disgusted at the hypocrisy:
"If he is successful and he is compensated as a successful person, it certainly gives him a different view on the evaluation of other successful people," said Charles Elson, the director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. He said Feinberg's salary would make him more sympathetic to other high-earners and more likely to enjoy a similar lifestyle.
I am guessing that this optimism is based on the expectation, well, that Mr. Feinberg would not be doing the job he was appointed to do:
"If you asked a citizen who earned considerably less than that to opine on whether payment was excessive or not, they might have a different answer from Kenneth Feinberg," said Paul Hodgson, a compensation expert at independent research firm Corporate Library. "On the other hand, I think what he's supposed to be looking at is not whether payments are excessive in size, but whether they are correctly structured and could encourage excessive risk taking."
So it's the minimum wage situation all over again. The only way minimum wage could avoid hurting our economy is for it to be so low that no one would have been working at or below that wage anyway. The only way a pay czar can avoid hurting our economy is for him to have such a high expectation of executive compensation, that so few executives actually receive that much pay (not for long, anyway). Why do we want either again?
For the record, I have no problem with high (or even unreasonable) executive compensation. If it truly is unreasonable, then his boss (i.e. stockholders) should have stopped that from happening, and if they didn't, they are simply earning the wages of their inaction. I also don't have problem with high fees for lawyers. While I do think the fact that lawyers earn so much represents a facet of a problem in our society, it is not the cause of the problem itself, and in any case, lawyers' fees are established in a competitive marketplace, so by definition it is fair.
What I do have a problem is for someone, like Mr. Feinberg, who has received the high rewards that our capitalistic economy affords to come around with the power of the government to smack everyone else down so that no one else can make that much again. It's just like George Soros or Warren Buffet, the billionaires who feel that they made enough money so they want to make sure that no one else can follow in their footsteps.
There is something that's really unfair.