Executive pay

Unbelievable:

Democrats and administration officials agreed that companies across the private sector need to adjust compensation practices to avoid damaging the economy.

Gene Sperling, a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, said administration guidelines call on all publicly held companies to link compensation to long-term performance, not short-term gains.

"We believe that compensation practices must be better aligned with long-term value and prudent risk management at all firms, and not just for the financial services industry," Sperling said.

On practical grounds this is nonsensical and grounded in the conceit that Sperling and others in government better know how corporations should run themselves than they do.

Morally it is equally repugnant, based on what Thomas Sowell has termed "cosmic justice":

In a sense, proponents of "social justice" are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice.

It's a simple imposition of their particular brand of morality and sense of how society should be ordered.

More than anything, however, it is the utter absurdity of this situation. The fact that Congress is lecturing anybody to focus on long-term goals even as they run up the national debt to new heights while enriching themselves and their supporters should prompt nothing but laughter.