I don't envy Kenneth Feinberg. Nor do I hate him. Even though, yes, he's an autocratic bastard who often seems to be disbursing from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund in a wholly arbitrary manner, he's also privy to a lot of whining and disingenuousness that you and I are not. After the NYTimes article, check out this article from The New Yorker. Below are some highlights:

With awards below the average -- currently about $1.5 million -- [Feinberg] was almost always willing to add a few hundred thousand; on one occasion, I heard him promise to give a widow an additional half million dollars for no other reason than that she had come in with her two small children and asked for it. As far as I could make it out, Feinberg's reasoning in these cases amounted to: Let's do what seems to work, and worry about how to justify it afterward. With awards in the very upper reaches, by contrast, he was staunchly, even theatrically, recalcitrant. One lawyer told Feinberg that he had calculated the proper payment for his client to be between sixteen and seventeen million dollars. "You've lost your fucking mind!" Feinberg exclaimed. "This guy should file a suit." "He might; you're giving him every reason to," the lawyer replied, calmly. "I want him to!" Feinberg said. "And do me a favor: hold a press conference. Say I wouldn't give the guy sixteen million dollars -- tax free!".

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Not surprisingly, Feinberg's position has infuriated the families of the most highly paid victims, who accuse him of acting arbitrarily, unfairly, and, finally, illegally. One day, I was sitting in Feinberg's office when a man whose wife had earned nearly four hundred thousand dollars a year came in to appeal his award. After several million dollars in offsets because of a life-insurance policy, the man was set to receive two million dollars. He felt he deserved at least another million. Feinberg asked the man whether he thought payments ought to be made solely on the basis of income, even if this meant that some already affluent families would receive ten million dollars in taxpayer money. "Yes, absolutely," the man responded. "The idea is to compensate me so my life style doesn't change, and my life style is different from a guy washing dishes. I don't live in a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month apartment. I live in a place that costs me five thousand dollars a month in mortgage payments."

I don't know how I would handle myself in his situation. On some days, I'm sure I would feel sorry for everyone who came through the door. On others, I might vomit from victims' cold reductions of dead relatives to dollar amounts, and tell 'em to hit the bricks.

And I don't think a disbursement scheme exists that would please everyone. Feinberg is a masochist.