Opinion: The wages of reverse snobbery

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Approval of the Bush administration’s financial rescue plan has been slowed by, among other things, a proposal to dock the severance pay of executives of bailed-out companies. Such limitations, though hard to enforce, would amount to a kind of rough justice for the profligacy of some Wall Street hotshots (though there is less enthusiasm for slapping the wrists of homebuyers who decided to live beyond their means.) But the disgust over excessive executive compensation predates the current financial crisis, and isn’t really about punishing bad judgment.

People were offended when the leaders of even successful companies were given kingly compensation packages, including stock options. The antipathy to multi-million-dollar pay packages and golden parachutes is rooted less in notions about performance and more in a combination of envy and aesthetics. The underlying attitude is that ‘no one should make that much money,’ even if (as in happier times economically) the recipients had to be lured to take the job by fabulous pay.

I don’t quarrel with this sort of populism, and have no problems either with sticking it to executives of mismanaged companies or allowing shareholders a say in executive compensation. But, like earmarks, executive pay is a drop in the fiscal bucket.

The same is true of at the public revulsion over pay raises for public officials, including federal judges -- though few people on the public payroll receive CEO-style salaries. At my former newspaper, letter-writers and one of our own columnists went on ad nauseam about the perfidy of legislators voting themselves a pay raise. The satisfaction of beating this decomposing horse was that it didn’t require any interest in or mastery of the issues these overpaid legislators dealt with.

‘Pay grabs’ for public officials were the ultimate equal-opprtunity outrage -- even if the raises were approved by an independent commission. Legislators were in a no-win position: If they raised their own salaries, they were self-dealing. If they empowered an outside group to set their salaries, they were cowards. The result was that legislators would forgo raises for a long time, then try to ‘catch up’ with large increases that the anti-pay-grab forces could denounce as excessive.

Opposition to higher pay for public officials has always struck me as the poor man’s snobbery. People on the public payroll are the one group ordinary citizens can feel superior to -- despite the paradoxical fact that they voted for these same miscreants. The implication seems to be: ‘If I chose you, you couldn’t be worth much.’ Not exactly a ringing endorsement of democracy.

*Photo of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke--and a bailout protester--at a Tuesday Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.