Updated January 22, 2014, 2:19 PM
I admire the move by the European Union to restrict the bonuses of that class of privileged civil servants called “bankers” — a recognition that the taxpayers have the right to control the income of those they subsidize and bail out, just as they set the salaries of other state-sponsored workers.
Restricting the bonuses of bankers would be correctly recognizing that taxpayers have the right to control the income of those they subsidize and bail out.
Alas, bankers in their current status are an offense to capitalism; they are in a strange situation of having upside without downside, no skin in the game. As an additional insult to the taxpayer, bankers paid themselves the largest bonus pool of their history in 2010 — thanks to Troubled Asset Relief Program…
via We Need to Stop This Banker Bonus Madness – NYTimes.com.
I recently finished reading Meghnad Desai’s “Marx’s Revenge”, a summary of the ups and downs and debates of economist from a Marxist perspective. This bail-out of banking, a small yet highly centralize sector of finance, is really a product of a planned economy as blueprinted by socialist planners. The irony is that the socialist were trying to mitigate the ebbs and flows of capitalism to mantain stability and help the working class. Yet the crique of capitalism that Marx exposed, and later was raised to a planned economy from various experiments, some ending in complete failure a la the Soviet Union, others in interesting success, say, Japan, now are tools to mitigate capitalism and risk by big quasi-socialist corporations, say, banks, at of course the expence of taxpayers, small business, and the working class. “Capitalism for profits, and Socialism for losses.” its absurd.