What should tick you off a lot more than AIG paying that $165 million in bonuses (contractually obligated, by the way) should be 1) the government's abject failure to properly regulate AIG in the first place and 2) the socialist power grab it represents, a move which undermines our economy and endangers our political liberties.
Below are just a couple of the illuminating paragraphs from today's Wall Street Journal editorial on the matter. But go ahead and read the whole thing right here.
...Given that the government has never defined "systemic risk," we're also starting to wonder exactly which system American taxpayers are paying to protect. It's not capitalism, in which risk-takers suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And in some cases it's not even American. The U.S. government is now in the business of distributing foreign aid to offshore financiers, laundered through a once-great American company.
The politicians also prefer to talk about AIG's latest bonus payments because they deflect attention from Washington's failure to supervise AIG. The Beltway crowd has been selling the story that AIG failed because it operated in a shadowy unregulated world and cleverly exploited gaps among Washington overseers. Said President Obama yesterday, "This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed." That's true, but Washington doesn't want you to know that various arms of government approved, enabled and encouraged AIG's disastrous bet on the U.S. housing market...
