Jokers, Smokers, and Midnight Tocquers
This past weekend’s big story was that the struggling American International Group had brought over $170 billion of taxpayer bailout money in the door, while giving about $165 million in bonuses to its own executives (presumably as a reward for their masterly stewardship of the company).
The issue here is that taxpayers are supporting high bonuses for the executives of a failing company, but many observers (including Kevin Drum, now of Mother Jones and formerly of the Washington Monthly) had been criticizing the outsized compensation packages of American business executives for years.
The disparity put Ian Salisbury of the Wall Street Journal in mind of Alexis de Tocqueville. Last month reader BPM directed my attention to this piece on whether a democracy can sustain a sharply skewed distribution of wealth. Take a look at the chart:
As Mel Brooks used to say, it’s good to be the king. The comparison here might have been more useful if this chart had included the wealthiest merchants, financiers, and industrialists of the 1830s United States, rather than just American civil servants. Still, when it comes to mainstream media invoking Democracy in America to get us through our troubled times, we’ll take what we can get.
