Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's pay czar, hath spoken: Thou shalt not collect cash bonuses, thou shalt accept the halving of thy pay, thou shalt do penance.

Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's pay czar, hath spoken: Thou shalt not collect cash bonuses, thou shalt accept the halving of thy pay, thou shalt do penance. The pay restrictions directed at the highest-paid employees of the seven firms that took the most taxpayer money are the product of both politics and emotion (the desire to punish), not of sound thinking. The typical Wall Street bank CEO had ten years' worth of his annual compensation tied up in company stock, he didn't dump his shares, and most of the mortgage-backed assets he got burned on were rated Triple-A: which is to say, the popular version of the financial crisis--it was caused by greed-crazed CEOs who loaded up on risky junk and then cashed out--is folk economics. President Obama promised to base his policies on science rather than superstition, but when the science is economics and the superstition is popular, he's a Flat Earther, a pre-Copernican. He may as well be throwing stones at the moon.