• A successful single European currency requires a single European monetary policy.
• A successful single European monetary policy requires a single European fiscal policy.
• A successful single European fiscal policy requires fiscal transfers from one part of the European Union to another.
• Fiscal transfers from one part of the European Union to another can only be undertaken over the long term by European institutions having democratic legitimacy.
• To achieve democratic legitimacy for European institutions, the nations of Europe will require full political union.

This is not a new argument.  I first heard it put by Zambian economist Chiselebwe Ng’andwe in a paper read to a meeting of the African Association of Political Science in Salisbury (later Harare), Zimbabwe, in 1981, talking about regional economic unions in Africa.   In today’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins refers back to a book about European integration by Larry Seidentop, published in 2000, which apparently makes a similar case about Europe.

Why is this argument not, then, widely understood?  Is it that some ideas are too comprehensible – in other words, apparently lacking in complexity or subtlety – to be understood by intelligent people? Or is that the political forces which benefit from the non-democratic European status quo are so strong as to prevent the adoption of democratic structures, and to muzzle the arguments for them?  As I recall, Ng’andwe’s talk was received very coldly by his audience, most of whom were keen on economic unions (between African countries), while maintaining national sovereignty in all other respects.

References:

Chiselebwe Ng’andwe [1981]:  Problems of Economic Integration in Africa.  Paper presented to the Fourth Bi-annual Meeting of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS 1981).  Salisbury, Zimbabwe:  May 1981.

Larry Seidentop [2000]:  Democracy in Europe.  London, UK: Penguin.

Technorati Tags: Larry Seidentop, Chiselebwe Ng’andwe

The Times article mentions the two main contenders for the leadership of ZANU (PF) following Bob’s always-imminently-predicted-but-never-quite-arriving retirement:  Emmerson Mnangagwa and Solomon Mujuru.  One would think that the Zimbabwean Vice-President, Joice Mujuru, who is likewise a ZANU (PF) nomenklatura, would perhaps also be a contender, but she is married to Solomon, so he takes precedence.   She is more famous in Zimbabwe under her chimurenga name, Teurai Ropa (or Spill-Blood) Nhongo, and for leading a team of guerrilla fighters into battle while pregnant.   Because she joined the struggle (for Independence) in her teens, she did not finish high-school; to her great personal credit, she completed her O-levels after Independence and while a Cabinet Minister.   In the year she did O-level English, a novel by George Orwell was on the syllabus, leading to her infamous stage whisper at the official opening by then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe Institute for Development Studies;  when the VIPs were led to a different (and much better) buffet than that provided for the other people present, she was heard by all to exclaim,  “But this is just like Animal Farm!”

Her husband also had a loud voice.  When I first met him, he was calling himself Rex Nhongo, and I did not then know what he looked like.  A mutual friend introduced us using only first names as we happened upon each other buying groceries one evening after work in a Greek delicatessen in the low-density (ie, formerly whites-only) suburbs of Salisbury (as it then was).  Making conversation while we stood in the queue, I asked,  “And what do you do for a living, Rex?”  In a booming voice which scared the daylights out of the white customers in the shop, he replied, “Oh, I’m Commander-in-Chief of the Army, son!”  Whether intended or not, this statement got the three of us to the front of the queue immediately.

FOOTNOTE:

Note that in maShona custom, a person may be given or may adopt different names over their life, and may prefer different names at different times or for different purposes.  In addition, for reasons of security during the liberation struggle many people adopted noms de guerre, so-called chimurenga names.

Technorati Tags: Emmerson Mnangagwa, Solomon Mujuru, Joice Mujuru, Robert Mugabe, Rex Nhongo

Because informants working for espionage agencies provide information on a regular basis to an employee of that agency, informants and their agents often develop quite close relationships.  Each has a secret which he or she usually cannot tell to other relatives or friends or colleagues – informants cannot usually divulge their information-passing actions to those around them, and agents usually do not divulge the names of their informants to their fellow employees.   Each also has to trust the other to some extent, and so the pair can develop quite a close relationship with one another; examples can be seen in Larry Devlin’s account of his close relationship with Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and Robert Baer’s account of his time working for CIA in the Middle East.

If our Robert had indeed been an informant (paid or unpaid) for CIA, then we would probably expect the agency to release him from that relationship when he was elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.  If he had developed a close relationship with his agency handler, then becoming PM would mean he would no longer have a close, neutral confidant.     Is this then why Mugabe became close to Lord Christopher Soames, the temporary Governor sent by Britain to oversee the election and the transfer of power at Independence?  Their relationship became so close that Mugabe asked Soames to stay on (as Governor? as President?) for a couple of years after Independence, a request Soames declined.   Is this also why Mugabe met weekly with his political enemy, Ian Smith, for about 18 months following Independence?    Until it fell apart in 1981, their relationship was sufficiently close that they were able to dance with each other’s wives at official functions, such as the ball held for the African Parliamentary Union meeting in Zimbabwe in 1981.

The closeness of both these relationships (Mugabe-Soames, Mugabe-Smith) has always struck me as odd.   But, if true, an ex-informant seeking another regular confidant could explain them both.

References:

Robert Baer [2002]: See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. Crown Publishing Group.

Larry Devlin [ 2007]:  Chief of Station, Congo.  New York, NY, USA:  Public Affairs.

Technorati Tags: Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe, Christopher Soames, Robert Baer, Larry Devlin

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neo-colonialism.   But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer.  Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing.  They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language.  They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies and royal botanical gardens.  They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t their home government would rarely bail them out.  If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism.  Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention.  Their policy fails but no one notices.  There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility.  Individual offices are never in any one place and rarely in one organization long enough to be adequately assessed.  The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neo-colonialists have no such performance criteria.  In fact their very uselessness benefits them.  By avoiding any serious action or judgement they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation or oppression.

Reference:

Rory Stewart [2004]: The Places in Between. London, UK:  Picador, p.272, footnote #59.

Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, Thomas Aikenhead, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Sol Plaatje, Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Theodore, John Curtin, Doc Evatt, Richard Sorge, Imre Nagy, Zhou Enlai, Milada Horakova, Bram Fischer, Salvador Allende Gossens, Lyndon Johnson, Donal Lamont, Rudolf Margolius, Gough Whitlam, Helen Suzman, Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Dubcek, Nelson Mandela, Zhao Ziyang, Martin Luther King Jr, Zdenek Mlynar, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Paul Keating, Vadim Delone, Barack Obama and Rory Stewart.

Australia (5), Czechoslovakia (5), and South Africa (4) have produced more than their per capita share of political heroes, it would seem, but the distribution no doubt reflects my reading and interests.  Of course, it hardly needs to be said that I do not necessarily agree with any or all the views these people have expressed or hold, nor necessarily support all their actions.

That brief colonial interlude  from December 1979 to April 1980 saw the holding of nationwide elections which were won by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU (PF), who won 57 of a possible 80 seats in the Zimbabwe House of Assembly.    The Lancaster House constitution, which came into force at Independence on 18 April 1980, reserved 20 of the 100 House of Assembly seats for MPs elected by voters on a separate, non-black voters’ roll.  In the 1980 elections, Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front (RF) party won all 20 of these seats, and 2 whites – one a member of the RF – were appointed by Robert Mugabe to his Cabinet.   The separate non-black voters’ roll was still in force at the next election, in 1985, but by then the white community was no longer as supportive of Smith’s recalcitrant belligerence towards the Government, and the white vote was split.  Candidates opposed to the RF won 5 of the 20 seats, with the anti-RF vote inversely proportional to the distance of the constituency from Mount Pleasant, the Harare suburb containing the University of Zimbabwe.   The 20 reserved seats were abolished in 1987.

Given the economic and social disaster into which Mugabe and his ZANU (PF) cronies have, with malice aforethought, led the country, it would not be surprising if anyone considered the Lancaster House Agreement a great historical error.   In my opinion, such a view would be mistaken.  By creating a mechanism to engage the Patriotic Front (the parties ZANU and ZAPU) and their military wings  in the electoral process, Lancaster House did achieve the ending of the Second Chimurenga, the war of liberation, and thereby allowed the country to have Independence with majority rule.   Also, by containing provisions which entrenched non-black privileges for seven years  (eg, the separate voters roll and the reserved seats in the Assembly), Lancaster House provided some assurances to the verkrampte wing of the white community, allowing them time, for example, to leave the country without the economically-disastrous fire-exit rush of skilled whites seen when Portugal granted Angola and Mozambique independence in 1975.   The racism, duplicity and recalcitrance of many members of the Zimbabwean white population in 1980 provide no justification, of course, for the murderous evil, racism, chicanery, peculation and complete corruption-of-intentions of the Mugabe regime.  A Government that uses its armed forces to operate protection rackets in other countries so as to enrich its senior officers, as the ZANU (PF) regime has done in Zaire, has lost any moral superiority it may have had over colonialism.

Technorati Tags: Lancaster House Agreement, Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, ZANU (PF)

• According to Larry Devlin’s account of his time as CIA Chief of Station in the newly-independent Zaire, CIA sought in the 1960s to recruit agents and paid informants inside the black nationalist political parties and liberation movements in African states.  Why would Southern Rhodesia be different?   Certainly, according to the memoir of Ken Flower, CIA had people stationed in Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s.
• The New York Times reported in 1990 (1990-06-09) that the CIA had played a part in the arrest of Nelson Mandela by the apartheid regime of South Africa in 1962, using an agent the CIA had within the South African ANC.
• According to Tom Lodge’s history of post-war black politics in South Africa, the South African Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), which was aligned with ZANU (PF), received financial support from the USA.  Lodge gives no sources for this statement.
• According to Heidi Holland’s biography of Mugabe, the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) facilitated his and Edgar Tekere’s escape across the border from Rhodesia into Mozambique in 1975 (Holland, pp. 175-6).  Was the CIO acting under advice from CIA?
• Following Zimbabwean Independence in 1980, the newly-elected Government of Robert Mugabe took two years before permitting the USSR to open an embassy in Zimbabwe.  The USA, the UK and the PRC were each permitted to open embassies immediately.  Mugabe’s party, ZANU (PF), of course had been aligned with (and mainly received support and training from) the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA during the Second Chimurenga while its main rivals, Joshua Nkomo’s PF-ZAPU, had been aligned with (and mainly received support and training from) the CPSU and the Soviet military.    The first Zimbabwean (and before that, Rhodesian and Zimbabwe-Rhodesian) Director of Central Intelligence, Ken Flower, says in his memoir:  “the early advice I received from [Minister of State Security, Emerson] Mnangagwa:  to accept foreign missions as friendly or ‘non-aligned’ until proved otherwise, but in the first instance to make life as difficult as possible for the Russians.” (page 273).
• For almost two years following Independence, Mugabe met weekly with Ian Smith, the racist and duplicitous Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia who had made the illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, and who resisted majority rule until forced to agree to it by the South African regime of John Vorster.
• Following Independence, Mugabe retained Ken Flower as head of the CIO until his retirement 18 months later, and then kept him on as a consultant for a period after that.  Flower had been head of the CIO from its foundation in 1963 under Rhodesian Prime Ministers Winston Field and Ian Smith, and Zimbabwe-Rhodesian PM, Bishop Abel Muzorewa.
• According to a report in Newsweek in February 1982, Joshua Nkomo told a press conference in the then Salisbury (renamed Harare later that year) following his dismissal from the Cabinet, that he had sought South African Government assistance to stage a coup against Mugabe and ZANU (PF), but this request had been refused.
• For at least several years following Independence, the counter-espionage unit of the Zimbabwe CIO had only two divisions:  one seeking to identify and counter South African espionage activities, and the other seeking to identify and counter Soviet espionage activities.  No staff of the CIO were devoted to identifying or countering US espionage activities.  I was told by various CIO officers (including Flower himself) during the 1980s that this was because the USA was not perceived by the Mugabe Government to pose a threat to the country or to the ruling party.  Such a position was, on the surface at least, quite odd, given the (then) avowedly socialist nature of the ZANU (PF) administration, its communist and anti-colonialist rhetoric, and its ostensibly close links to the regimes of Angola, Cuba, the DDR, the DPRK, Libya and Mozambique.  It should also be recalled that during its first decade of Independence, Zimbabwe experienced regular bombings and other acts of terrorism by agents of the apartheid regime of South Africa; these acts included the destruction by terrorist bombs in 1982 of most of the nation’s airforce.   Moreover, some of the white staff of the Zimbabwe CIO, including some in counter-espionage, were themselves South African agents, as was demonstrated when some of these people subsequently defected to RSA.  Zimbabwe had considerable reason to fear foreign espionage at this time.
• Western Governments, including the administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, were remarkably quiet about Mugabe’s genocidal campaign of violence against the people of Matabeleland in 1983-1987, the Gukurahundi.   Indeed, the UK and the USA expressed far more concern for the fate of the white commanders of the Zimbabwean Airforce, arrested, held illegally, and tortured following the bombings of 1982.  The Reagan administration had added Zimbabwe to its list of countries eligible to receive US military aid in December 1982. 
• Members and supporters of PF-ZAPU, most recently the brave Judith Todd, have long suggested that some senior members of ZANU (PF) were paid CIA agents. 

Unless someone like Larry Devlin writes his memoirs, I doubt we will ever know the facts in this case.  

Latest revision of this post:  2010-01-04.

References:

Larry Devlin [ 2007]:  Chief of Station, Congo.  New York, NY, USA:  Public Affairs.

Ken Flower [1987]: Serving Secretly: Rhodesia’s CIO Chief on Record.  Johannesburg, RSA:  Galago.

Heidi Holland [2008]:  Dinner with Mugabe. Johannesburg, RSA:  Penguin.

Tom Lodge [1983] : Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945. Longman.

Judith Garfield Todd [2007]:  Through the Darkness:  A Life in Zimbabwe. Cape Town, RSA:  Zebra Press.

Kenneth Arrow, Michael Atiyah, PK van der Byl, James Callaghan, Noam Chomsky, Don Dunstan, Steve Fuller, Bob Hawke, Xavier Herbert, Anahid Kassabian, Robert Mugabe, Ralph Nader, Joseph Rotblat, Rory Stewart, Oliver Tambo, Edgar Tekere, Rene Thom, John Tukey, Gough Whitlam,Gerry Wilkes, Elizabeth Windsor, and Andrew Young.

In this list are two Nobelistas (Arrow/Economics and Rotblat/Peace), two Fields Medallists (Atiyah, Thom) and several politicians.   Joseph Rotblat, although then in his 90s, stood for an hour and spoke compellingly without notes of the early history of the atomic bomb.   Although not invited, I once attended a ceremony at which the Australian Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, gave a speech, so I have included her here.   Bob Hawke I heard give his maiden speech as an MP in the Australian Commonwealth House of Representatives in 1980, a speech I witnessed from the public gallery; contrary to both custom and to subsequent newspaper reports, his speech was interrupted by heckling from the Government (ie, Liberal and National Parties) benches.  Of the people listed, the speakers who most impressed me as orators were Mugabe, Stewart, Whitlam and Young; the speakers who most impressed me as intellects were Fuller, Stewart and Whitlam.  The speakers who least impressed me were Callaghan and Chomsky.

Callaghan, giving an address to an Australian Labor Party fund-raising luncheon in Canberra, a year or so after his election defeat in 1979, spoke to an audience who had each paid a significant amount to hear him (AUD 50, if I recall correctly).  Despite this, he said barely 100 words, along these lines:  “You Australians have a great country here!  Whatever you do, don’t ruin it with socialism!  I’m sure you don’t want to hear my opinions, so let me mingle with you, table-by-table.” These words were spoken notwithstanding the fact that we had each paid good money precisely in order to hear his opinions.   Callaghan, former British Prime Minister, Privy Counsellor, and newly a Lord of the Realm, then stepped off the platform, went straight to the the official table, and stayed there the remainder of the lunch.   It would have been nice to have heard a speech with an argument or two, or even a reflective anecdote, but I suppose ex-Prime Ministers have no one to write their speeches for them.   If ever there was a demonstration of the great prior expectations created and the enormous vapidness of the delivery which follows them in the modern British Labour Party, this was it.

Although speaking for 75 minutes rather than 5, Chomsky also presented no arguments.  Talking on the broad theme of the vile wickedness of the USA, he instead gave a series of haiku-like statements on topic after topic, mostly examples of evil actions or intentions of varous US administrations, all the way back to Ulysses S. Grant.    These topics were not discussed in any discernible order.  After some time of this topic-flitting, I noticed the lack of continuity and the absence of any apparent order, and so I began to count the number of successive statements on each topic.    I never got past 5 successive statements on the same topic, although I did notice the same topics appeared and re-appeared several times in the course of the talk, subtly restated (not merely repeated), like old patterns coming back into view in a kaleidoscope.   In music theory terms, the form was something like:  A-B-C-D-A-E-D-F-G-H-C-A-H-C-I-J-K-B-L-E-. . . .  Most of the audience seemed to approve of Chomsky’s talk, so he was certainly not unwise in adopting the structure he did.   Indeed, perhaps this was evidence of sophisticated efficiency in his rhetorical-targeting:  If you already believe that the USA is the source of all evil in the modern world, without a single mitigating feature, then you don’t need to hear any arguments demonstrating this belief; and if you don’t already believe this, then you don’t normally attend public lectures given by Noam Chomsky.

Technorati Tags: Bertrand Russell, TS Eliot, Mao Tse-Tung, Kenneth Arrow, Michael Atiyah, PK van der Byl, James Callaghan, Noam Chomsky, Don Dunstan, Steve Fuller, Bob Hawke, Xavier Herbert, Anahid Kassabian, Robert Mugabe, Ralph Nader, Joseph Rotblat, Rory Stewart, Oliver Tambo, Edgar Tekere, Rene Thom, John Tukey, Gough Whitlam, Gerry Wilkes, Elizabeth Windsor, Andrew Young, Queen Elizabeth II

Let me start by repeating firmly what I said before (here abbreviated), as preface:

• Owners of companies (including the present British Government) have the legal and moral right to establish any legal payment policies they so wish. 
• People who fail should not be rewarded for that failure.

Then let me repeat this para:

Finally, in all the nonsense spoken about a “bonus culture” in banks, I have nowhere seen any discussion as to WHY bonus payments are common in the financial world.   The first reason is that financial markets are capricious:  despite all the boastful talk about skills and experience, and despite the multi-terabytes of computer memory, the massively-high bandwidths of connection, and the arrays of rocket scientists deployed, the taking of positions in markets is still a matter of taking views on the future, and betting these views against other views.   The future is uncertain, so bets can lose, as well as win,  and these two outcomes may happen regardless of the skills or expertise or resources applied to the taking of a view.  People may be just lucky or unlucky – even clever, experienced, well-resourced, cautious, nice people.    The second reason is that when bets win, they may win big.    If  a company makes hundreds of millions of dollars profit from a one or a handful of trades, it can seem most unfair to those deciding what trades to do that all of this capricious, windfall gain should accrue just to the shareholders.  Those doing the trading therefore ask, quite reasonably in my opinion, for a share of this windfall gain.   Most companies have then a choice:  give a few percent of these capricious windfalls to the staff doing the work as bonus payments, or risk losing the staff to the competitor down the street who will.   No rational, long-term manager would choose the latter option, and no rational, long-term shareholder would force him or her to.

There is another aspect to the business of the financial sector that I overlooked in this description.  For most of us working in companies, our actions have impacts on the revenues, costs and profits of the company only indirectly.  Typically, the larger the organization the more indirect the effects.  A product manager for one of the thousands of consumer products at, say, Proctor and Gamble, for instance may have great ideas for innovative product development, ideas which, when implemented, lead to massive increases in corporate revenues.  But she would not be able to develop these ideas, create the necessary support infrastructures (which may include product redesigns, or new manufacturing facilities, or new marketing campaigns) and then execute them, without help and support from a very large number of people; perhaps as many as tens of thousands of people would be involved for the most complex of products, from research scientists through to traveling salespeople in equatorial Africa.   Success in such environments requires real – and all too rare – skills at group-working, information sharing, socialization, co-ordination, complex project planning, and managing of others (in all directions, below, above and laterally), both inside one’s own company and in partner companies.  These abilities are required in addition to whatever linguistic and/or mathematical intelligence required (which can be considerable for any high-tech product and even for ordinary consumer durables) and so-called emotional intelligence.   This is a getting-things-done intelligence, a skill-set that otherwise very intelligent and successful people may lack, for example, academics, writers, medical professionals.

Strangely enough, few bankers, in my experience, need these getting-things-done abilities either, and few have them.  The large sums in finance, which generate the large bonuses, usually accrue (as I said above) to successful bets on the future.  To make such bets you need: (a) to take a view on the future (a view which may arise from sophisticated, complex and expensive computer modeling) and (b) money to bet with.  You don’t normally need a large team behind you, although computer modeling may require rare and specialised – and hence, expensive – skills. You don’t need much equipment, just a laptop and access to processing power (now rentable by the minute); you certainly don’t need a factory, or a global distribution network, or a boffin-filled R&D lab, as the product managers for P&G do.  Apart from the money used to bet with, you don’t need much money either.   You may need, as sociologist Donald MacKenzie has shown in his detailed fieldwork studies of financial institutions, a good network of contacts, both in your own organization and outside it, of people whom you trust you and who trust you; you need this network in order to be able to accurately predict financial market movements, and to predict how market participants would be likely to react to new information, in other words, to help you to take a view on the future.

So, suppose you work for a large financial institution in the City of London, betting on (say) US Dollar-to-Japanese Yen exchange rates.  You come into work, you read the newsfeeds, you look at the numbers, you talk with your network, you (or your team) do your computer simulations, you take a view of the future, and you place your bet.  (You may do this with any frequency, from every few weeks to every few minutes, depending on the market you are in and the strategies you running.)   The money you use to bet with belongs to your employer.  Perhaps you bet the value of the USD will rise in comparison to the Yen, as a result of the recent Japanese election.   Or perhaps you bet that most other exchange traders will bet that it will rise for this reason, and so you would profit from betting against them.  For whatever reason – good judgment, intuition, experience, clever algorithms, computer processing power, speed of reaction, personal network connectedness, luck, clever accounting, inside information, mojo, guidance from the beyond - your bets are successful, and thus you (and perhaps your small team) generate large revenues for your employer.   Unlike our friend at P&G, no one can say these revenues depended on the supportive and co-ordinated activities of hundreds or thousands of people working over months or years.  No one can say that your employer would have got the revenues anyway, even without you.  And given the few required inputs listed in the previous paragraph, no one can stop you walking out of your office one afternoon and offering your successful judgment (your view-taking ability) to some other employer with money to bet.  As the saying goes, the bank’s key assets walk out the front door each evening.

In other words, large bonuses exist in the financial world because large revenue streams exist which are directly traceable to the actions of a small number of people, and because not paying good bonuses to these people risks the employer losing the revenue streams.   None of this is evidence of malice, or evil, or some malcontent recalcitrance on the part of bankers, failing to reform despite the bailout.  It is the very nature of business under capitalism.  Employees are acting rationally and ethically in asking for such bonuses, and employers in giving them.  Large bonuses would exist in other industries if the conditions were right; indeed, they do, for senior managers in IPOs and acquisitions, or for Hollywood stars, able to guarantee large audiences for the opening weekends of films.  In both these cases, as with finance, large money streams can be traced directly to the actions of a small number of people.   If you were to make it illegal for banks to pay bonuses, then for consistency’s sake, you’d have to also tell JK Rowling to give up her millions.  Arguing that bonuses should not exist will be about as successful as arguing that water should not run downhill, and is, in my opinion, about as rational.

Reference:

Iain Hardie and Donald MacKenzie [2007]: Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a Hedge Fund. The Sociological Review, 55 (1): 57-80.