This is America?

Pay czar Kenneth Feinberg cut salaries before he raised them. If that sounds like one of John Kerry's flip-flops from the 2004 presidential election campaign, it is probably because Feinberg has a job that simply shouldn't exist in America.

Feinberg is responsible for reviewing employee compensation at the largest recipients of government bailout funds.

He announced last week significant reductions in employee compensation for the top 25 employees at seven large TARP and auto bailout recipients, saying: "One of the critical aspects of what I tried to do was to vastly diminish the amount of guaranteed cash salary that would be paid these top officials."

"Guaranteed cash salary" is another phrase for your weekly paycheck. But now we learn that Feinberg increased salaries, while reducing discretionary cash bonuses.

Bonuses are paid based on the employee's individual performance, as well as the success of the company and the groups within the company for whom they work.

Feinberg aslo increased significantly the amount of stock employees are paid and the amount of time they have to hold the stock before it can be sold. While this seemingly ties compensation to the company's performance, the reality is that for most of the effected employees, outside the CEO and perhaps a handful of senior executives, their individual performance has only a modest effect on the company's stock price at these large companies.

So Feinberg, in bowing down to the anti-compensation crowd, has moved away from a pay-for-performance compensation culture through his intervention in the market for employee compensation.

And as bad as this is for the health of the companies in question and the overall economy (note that Feinberg and the Obama administration want this to serve as an example other companies to emulate), it represents another in the long line of outrageous interventions by the government in matters that ought to lie outside the proper scope of government.