Let's Play Another Round of 'Bashing AIG'

Don't play their game.

Whose game? The government "progressives" who want you to hate AIG -- and thus by extension all those who deal with big money issues. Or more simply, they want you to hate the rich!

Right now Barney Frank (a national disgrace rapidly working himself into worldwide competition) is livid over $165 million in bonuses paid by insurer AIG to its employees. Barney is the blocking back for President Obama, who this morning called the bonuses an "outrage" and pledged that the feds will do everything legally possible to stop the bonus payments.

AIG has received about $170 billion in bailout funds.

A few key points to keep in mind:

1. The bonuses are required by the employment contracts of those who merited the bonuses. It is the price an insurer pays to attract and keep competent help. It would be a breach of contract -- a violation of the law -- not to pay them.

2. Frank claims "these bonuses are going to people who screwed this thing up enormously." That is pure bullshit! AIG is an insurer. It is in trouble because it must pay claims to banks on insurance contracts for investments they made that went bad, many of them piss-poor bundled mortgage investments that were created because Barney Frank and his cronies in Congress, and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, forced lenders to make loans to people who were never going to make good on repayment. If Frank were honest, he would have to resign from Congress for it is his failure, and his continued coverup, that is most egregious.

3. Mr. Obama knows all of this, and doesn't care. It serves his purpose to have a national scapegoat. It draws your attention away from the other things he is doing, or getting ready to do.

4. If we are going to hunt for bedrock principles upon which to stand, then we never should have bailed out AIG, or any of the other financial institutions, in the first place. That was not the position of Barney Frank at the time all this was happening. It is not his position now. Who the hell knows what Mr. Obama's position was at the time all this began (he wouldn't commit)? Who the hell knows what it will be tomorrow, or next week?

5. Barney Frank says: "Maybe it's time to fire some people. We can't keep them from getting bonuses but we can keep them from having their jobs. ... In high school, they wouldn't have gotten retention (bonuses), they would have gotten detention." That rhetoric is designed to inflame the public, which is mad as hell already at the whole mess, but it sheds no light on the truth of the matter, which is that Barney Frank wants to get his grubby, greasy fingers inside the bowels of the American banking system.

Please don't fall for this game. You don't have to like the big banks, and you don't have to like or admire the rich. Just realize that you could take every dollar of wealth away from the rich and powerful, distribute it equally among all the rest of us -- like that will ever really happen, sure! -- and you will have a country in chaos that will not be secure, happy or productive.

Ban bonuses, make executives afraid to make decisions to incent the help, and you will reduce American business to the same mediocre level of efficiency that you will find in your average government-run health clinic. If you want to kill the capitalist geese that laid the golden eggs that created the wealthiest economy in the history of the world, let Mr. Frank and Mr. Obama continue to call plays from the progressive playbook that got its start back in the FDR administration.

And then we will have true equality. The equality of the equally miserable.