Pay czar or fascist dictator?

To the ubiquitous, anonymous “Oh please,” instead of calling this blog “conservative propaganda,” why don’t you argue intelligently against me? The same goes for the rest of you. I don’t care much about arguments that Bush did this or Clinton or Reagan did that. What we are seeing now is unprecedented — in this country, that is. It has been proven, decisively, to be disastrous in the rest of the world.
Which brings me to the new pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg. President Obama is giving him broad powers to review the salaries of the top 100 employees at financial institutions that received bailout cash, and he would like to extend that power over other firms, as well, to determine whether salaries are excessive or foster too much risk.
It sounds like something George Orwell might have imagined. Yes, Orwell believed in democratic socialism. But he was a foe of totalitarianism, which is what a government pay czar sounds like.
I like this blog by E. Thomas McClanahan of the Kansas City Star Editorial Page. Yes, it was ridiculous for firms to pay outlandish bonuses to executives who ran companies into the ground. But the market takes care of that sort of behavior, as we have seen. If you think the government can do it better, with its “familiar clanking bureaucratic machinery,” you haven’t had much experience in the world, nor do you understand the government’s role in the current economic crisis.
Wall Street either will figure out ways around these regulations, or American firms will lose out to overseas firms that can set salaries according to actual worth. But a bunch of government bureaucrats, who have nothing to gain or lose by a company’s performance, never will make business decisions the way the private sector can.
Or is that just more conservative propaganda?