WFB is hopping mad, and it's fun to see him get well and truly steamed. The National Review built its success on the amusement value of Buckley in high dudgeon, even if you didn't agree with him. He's especially tasty when the targets of his wrath are so well-deserving.
Buckley's entertaining message is also a serious one, and, unfortunately for us and him, he doesn't have a ready solution to propose to the chronic problem he highlights.
Every ten years I quote the same adage from the late Austrian analyst Willi Schlamm, and I hope that ten years from now someone will remember to quote it in my memory. It goes, "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists."
Buckley proceeds to detail the "executive plunder" of salaries. bonuses and stock options that are jaw-dropping in their chutzpah -- especially when we consider the compensation was "earned" during a year Viacom's share price dropped 18 percent and losses were in the billions. But wait, there's more!
Consider excruciating, but apparently tolerable, incidentals. Mr. Freston [Viacom co-president] is based in New York. But from time to time, business requires him to be in Los Angeles — where, as it happens, he also has a home. On those nights does he take hotel rooms? Ample hotel rooms, understand. No. He just charges the company what he thinks is appropriate to pay him for using his own home. In 2004, this amounted to $43,000. He is evidently a man with simpler habits than the Los Angeles-based Mr. Moonves's [Viacom's other co-president]. He does the same kind of thing, he has his own home in New York, but what he charged the company for the nights he spent in New York was $105,000.
Viacom is not an outlier in today's world of big-time celebrity executive compensation, as Buckley emphasizes. And as his opening adage reminds us, he's certainly not claiming that in the annals of greed today's captains of industry are somehow unique. Nor is he complaining of a lack of "equity" or "fairness" when the boss takes home so much more than either the employees who work for him or the shareholders for whom he, at least in theory, works.
The sin of which Buckley accuses these executives is, quite simply, that they have no shame. This loss of an ability to see their conduct as shameful is an assault on the very system from which they derive such outsized benefits, a market that appears to have lost its moorings and has no self-corrective mechanisms.
What dismays is the utter lack of class in such businesses and businessmen here parading their skills in distortion. Michael Eisner appears twice in the table of the 25 largest compensation packages paid in a single year. In 1993 he took home $203 million. In 1998, $575.6 million.
That money was taken, directly, from company shareholders. But the loss, viewed on a larger scale, is a loss to the community of people who believe in the capitalist free-market system. Because extortions of that size tell us, really, that the market system is not working — in respect of executive remuneration. What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous [em added].
Unlike some of the youngsters who now appear under WFB's old masthead, Bill Buckley is willing to acknowledge that the system which he believes is humanity's best hope isn't a utopian self-equilibrating machine. Like all institutions humans have ever invented, the free market is still subject to the broader moral vision and self-discipline of those with power. Buckley's tone may be more acerbic than John Danforth's mournful critique [$ archive] of today's Republican party leadership, but both share a dismay with what is essentially a lack of moral bearings that threatens the healthy functioning of both our economic and political systems. This is a danger implicit in our political economy, and both gentlemen believe its best corrective is a regular dose of sunshine that brings the abusers of power to the court of public opinion. Hear, hear!
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