On March 24, the House Financial Services Committee of the United States Congress went where no government body in this country had ventured before it, and passed a bill allowing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to regulate the salaries of all of the people employed by the companies that took government money, under the terms of the bailouts beginning last year.
The measure was approved a week later by the full House.
Setting aside two qualifications – that someone giving money to somebody else can attach whatever conditions he wants to the bargain, and that some of these people and companies appear to deserve it -this is something that Congress should think about twice.
The problem is that this new assumption of power is a change not of degree, but of kind. It goes down the path of what Thomas Sowell has called ‘cosmic justice,’ which differs from what he describes as ‘traditional’ justice, in that it seeks not to right wrongs caused by criminal acts through laws that are commonly recognized, but to create ideal conditions of absolute ‘fairness,’ based upon standards on which few can agree.
Traditional justice has limited goals, which it tends to accomplish; the goals of cosmic justice are always unreachable (and often result in a counter-reaction.) Traditional justice goes by well-known procedures; cosmic justice makes up its own rules as it goes.
Sowell admits that traditional justice often seems to be lacking; that life, and the markets, are unfair and immoral, creating a outcry that standards be set. But if they are set, then someone has to set them, and this where problems come in.
Who sets the rules, and how are they supervised? How are they kept free of corruption and influence? How big, and expensive, does this agency get, and how intrusive? The markets at least are diverse and impersonal, and made up of millions of elements, but what few men alone can be given this power? Timothy Geithner, who didn’t pay all his taxes? John Murtha? Or perhaps Barney Frank?
Traditional justice ended slavery, ended segregation, slapped fines on people caught in acts of illegal discrimination in specific cases against individuals, and worked as it should have, clearing the way for integration to follow. Cosmic justice was affirmative action, a.k.a. quotas and busing, which blew up in the face of its authors, and bombed.
It was true enough that most blacks are less well-off today than they would have been minus past generations of prejudice, and one can’t fault the people who tried to correct this. The drawback was that many whites from Catholic and south and east Europe were also less rich than they would have been if they and their forebears hadn’t encountered prejudice also, and not only had nobody helped them, but the government was now insisting they give back the fruits of their ‘privilege’ which they believed didn’t exist.
The complaints of both sides were wholly deserving, which was the real problem. The trouble in this case with ‘cosmic justice’ was that it wasn’t quite cosmic enough.
True cosmic justice would require fine-tuned calibrations of every injustice suffered by every group, and by everyone in it, as all blacks, Jews, and Irish did not suffer alike.
Not all White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) were rich, well-connected, or mean to blacks, Jews, or their Catholic servants, if any. Should WASPs descended from slave holders be penalized more than those descended from abolitionists and/or Union soldiers? This sounds picayune, but without everything weighed, cosmic justice stops being just, much less being cosmic. It starts being unfair, if just by omission. And making exceptions can never be just.
The same problems in determining what people deserve in questions of race and/or history would apply to questions of merit, and worth. Perhaps the CEO whose company tanks shouldn’t be paid well, but what of the network anchor who inks the eight-figure deal as his network bleeds viewers, and his program sinks to third place?
The government should punish crime where it exists (though not retroactively), and it should try to shame, or to lead through persuasion, but it should resist the urge to fine-tune and re-order the universe. Cosmic justice starts with the best of intentions, but often ends up in a ditch.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
