At first, we suspected State Comptroller Alan Hevesi’s lunge for control of a privately-owned, not-for-profit corporation — the New York Stock Exchange — was simple hubris. However, after reading his letter to the editor, which we published Friday, we are beginning to suspect the problem goes deeper than that. It seems that Mr.Hevesi simply does not grasp the basics of the situation. He is insisting that the problem with the New York Stock Exchange is that it needs to be run by someone other than its owners and that he deserves a role in running it. Mr. Hevesi and his various state and local pension fund manager friends are using the controversy over Richard Grasso’s remuneration as the opening for a pure power grab.

They are doing this under cover of the governance priesthood. “As a representative of millions of investors and millions of New Yorkers, a strong NYSE is my goal,” claims Mr. Hevesi, closing his letter to the Sun. Are New Yorkers to suppose that the NYSE’s owners — its 1,366 members, the specialists, brokers, and traders — have a different goal? It seems doubtful. Rather, if anyone has goals that deviate from the pure good of the stock exchange, it would seem to us they would be those, like Mr. Hevesi and Co., subject to the whims of voters and the hunger for higher political office. Mr. Hevesi’s predecessor, H. Carl McCall, was criticized during New York’s last gubernatorial campaign by his primary opponent,Andrew Cuomo, for not investing the state’s pension funds in a more “socially responsible” — we would say “politically correct” — manner. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how similar political gamesmanship could bleed into the governance of the NYSE if Mr. Hevesi and Co. were given, as a right, a role in its governance.

There are echoes of this fight in the attempt to increase the number of “independent” directors at public, for-profit companies — as if “independent” directors are somehow inherently more responsible than owner-managers. At least those independent directors have to stand for a proxy election before the shareholders, i.e, the owners.What Mr. Hevesi is proposing would go beyond that.

We have argued that the problem with Mr. Grasso’s pay was that it was not in the interests of the NYSE’s owners. We can see that because when they woke up to what was happening, they fired him. Mr. Hevesi, in his letter, disagreed. He said, “The issue here was a regulator being paid a huge amount by those he is supposed to regulate.” But it was Mr. McCall, one of the “public” directors of the NYSE, who headed the exchange’s compensation committee that okayed Mr. Grasso’s $139.5 million payout. It is, moreover, in the very nature of the NYSE that those who are regulated compensate the regulator. The size of the pay package is only a matter of degree. The NYSE describes itself as a “member-owned cooperative and self-regulatory organization.” According to a backgrounder put together by Mr. Hevesi and Co., onethird of its revenue comes from listed companies and one-half comes from brokerdealer members. It’s hard to imagine what governance structure could eliminate this fundamental conflict.

Despite such conflicts, the organization has worked quite well since it was founded in 1792; it operated for about 180 years as an unincorporated membership organization. What’s kept it honest is not a lack of “conflicts of interest,” but the fact that if it weren’t honest, people would take their business elsewhere. The exchange could have decided that it’s okay to let crooked traders get away with swindling investors, or they could have chosen to be secretive and opaque, but the owners know their livelihood hinges on running a market preferable to the competition. There are, after all, other stock exchanges, like the Nasdaq and the American.

No doubt it would take some doing to get the blue chips to move. But even the Big Board can’t take them for granted. There is also the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington. At the end of the day, the owners of the New York Stock Exchange have every incentive to make sure that their business is respected and trusted. If you boil down the motives of the politicians like Mr. Hevesi, they start to look like the kind of greed called socialism.