John Tamny, RealClearMarkets
As this column has regularly argued, government investment is never passive. Once federal bureaucrats slip under the private tent with aid masked as “investment”, all manner of controls are part and parcel of a private/public future. And as this column stated last October, compensation controls are never far behind.
So in the above sense, we shouldn’t be surprised in the least that the alleged stimulus plan being signed by President Obama today includes executive compensation limits for TARP beneficiaries at $500,000. That was inevitable, and as Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute has so astutely observed, if corporations want the presumed good that comes with government handouts, they must also accept the bad, which has to do with the fact that government employees aren’t paid in the way that private sector workers are. Let this be an indelible lesson for future failed enterprises naïve enough to think that government aid doesn’t come with strings attached.