$3.7 Billion Annual Salary Besmirches Capitalism

When was the last time you filled out your 1040 and wrote in $3,700,000,000 as your gross (pun intended) annual salary? John Paulson did for tax year 2007. And how did he reap such a bounty? Did he invent a cure for cancer? Compute the elusive formula for achieving Peace In Our Time? Help the human race in any way, shape, or form? Not quite. He 'earned' it by managing an investment hedge fund, betting against homeowners while hoping and praying to the Almighty Dollar Devil that those homeowners would default on their subprime mortgages!

Paulson ranked number 1 in this salary category, best described as obscene, that would have made the robber barons of Teddy Roosevelt's day cringe and join the Socialist Party in protest. Paulson did NOTHING to benefit the people of our great land. He is a vulture feeding off the carcass of a badly wounded mortgage industry. Had he been an inventor who rolled out an inexpensive, 150 MPG car that made the USA less dependent on foreign oil while simultaneously saving every family in the country a hefty amount of money and improving air quality, I would congratulate him.

But even then, how much compensation would be appropriate? Astronomical salaries like Paulson's stir up bitterness (like mine) and distrust for an economic system that, with tweaks here and there, has served us so well. Have we, as a nation, become so 'me-centered' that we judge people by their paychecks rather than their principles? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that our Constitution's preamble begins with the words, "We the People", not "Me first, the rest can go to Hell". Why do people like Paulson funnel their considerable intellects and energies toward self-aggrandizement rather than selflessness? Is it a character flaw? Insecurity? Hatred or jealousy... or never having developed past the anal-retentive stage?

Had Paulson been around back in 1776, he probably would have been a Boston bookie laying odds against the revolution. Then, when his bets lost, he would have high-tailed it back to not-so-Great Britain to kiss up to King George III by preaching the virtues of monarchy over democracy.