Lehe: Outrage distracts taxpayers

These last few weeks, you’ve been able to turn on C-SPAN and see politicians having the… These last few weeks, you’ve been able to turn on C-SPAN and see politicians having the times of their lives. Righteous indignation is exhilarating and gratifying: instead of controlling your anger, the moral impetus is on letting it flow, like giving a urine sample of emotion. It even seems like some senators have been holding their anger all these years, just to make it that much more impressive when they let loose all over your TV screen.

And if there’s one thing everyone can get righteously indignant about, it’s bonuses at AIG.

It’s not the first time this year our congresspersons showed off how mad they can get over other people making money. Today the Left is wringing its hands over bonuses, but a few months ago it was the Right freaking out over the $70 per hour that UAW workers were raking in. This $70 is sort of a mythical figure — both in its impact and in its loose relation to reality — but it makes you wonder: ‘

Who are we to decide — or even care — how much someone else makes? If an autoworker or a CEO can finagle a few suckers, why should we care more compared to when someone wins the lottery? No one makes you buy stock or products from AIG or GM.

The truth is that we usually don’t care how much other people earn. Americans are almost unique among the world’s peoples for a laissez-faire attitude toward their neighbors’ pay stubs. Generally, Americans want to take some of the rich people’s money in taxes to buy public services, but Americans don’t actually begrudge rich people for making money in the first place.

When the money at stake is our tax dollars, though, it’s a different story. Look at the outrage over the midnight raises Pennsylvania’s congresspersons gave themselves. We not only feel an interest, we even start to feel an audacious expertise. ‘Such and such is just too much for an unskilled worker to make!’ you’d hear someone say about the autoworkers, just like now you hear that CEO compensation is ‘obscene.’

Suddenly, millions of average folks — who don’t lay claim to any special edge in deciding the best price for sulfuric acid, printer paper, semiconductors or any of the other things businesses have to buy to make the products we want — feel qualified to discern the proper price of an autoworker’s or a CEO’s labor. We are stabbing in the dark, and feeling scarily confident about our aim.

The experience of the past year should etch an important warning in our memories. The cost of government intervention is measured in more than just the expenditures of tax dollars. It is also the strife our society has to bear to take collective action. Citizens who used to not care about each other are now at each other’s throats. The old argument, ‘It’s none of your business,’ loses most of its punch when the business in question — AIG or General Motors — actually is your business, if you’re a citizen of America.

Hence, the post-bailout world is haunted by new strains of logic, like:

1. Some corporations got bailouts.

2. Some rich people have some kind of fuzzy association with corporations.

3. All the rich people and corporations owe us all their money.

If you’ve spent much time abroad, you might have noticed the absence of violent protests that happen in America. That’s because in America, there’s less incentive to have a protest. Protests are to get public attention, but when your remuneration isn’t a public matter, there’s nothing gained by a protest. In South America, by contrast, you can go out in the streets and see the taxi drivers upset over what the government has regulated their raises to be this year.

The protests we’re seeing now over CEO compensation, like the strikes we’re sure to see when it comes time to slice and dice General Motors and Chrysler — to the necessary misery of thousands of autoworkers — are a consequence of a situation when protesting could actually yield the individuals protesting a sizable profit. And the time wasted protesting, lobbying, arguing on TV news and writing articles like this one are a real cost on society. I wish I could’ve written a funny article today. But duty called.

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‘ E-mail Lewis at lewis500@gmail.com.