Richard Grasso, former head of the New York Stock Exchange, emerged victorious yesterday and can keep the $139.5 million paid to him by the Exchange, despite attempts by New York State to negate the compensation.

Well, chalk up a victory for freedom of contract. Sort of.

The real reason the Grasso case likely came out as it did was because of the Exchange’s merger in 2006 that made it a public, for-profit company, which negated New York’s standing in the suit. The appellate decision ultimately was not on the merits of the case. A lower court had already decided against Grasso.

This all occurring as if the New York attorney general’s office had a remotely public policy reason for pursuing Grasso in the first place. The man ran the New York Stock Exchange, which even when it operated as a “non-profit”, is not your average not-for-profit operation. Not many non-profits monitor 1.4 billion daily securities trades - the dollar volume, though without an official tabulation, is multiples of that. All of the sudden, Grasso’s compensation is sorely insignificant in percentage terms, which are the only real terms that matter.

Grasso started as a clerk on the Exchange, truly the making of a great American success story. He is credited with the reinvigoration of the Big Board after 9/11, a remarkable feat that cannot be undervalued. The lesson learned from the disgraced Eliot Spitzer, who initiated the suit when he was the state’s attorney general, is that success ought to be capped, that the American dream is, in fact, partially dead.

The numbers simply do not matter. The numbers should never matter. There is no such thing as “getting paid too much” for anything. If left to its own devices, the market will always decide what the market will bear. As long as the contract is a voluntary one, no third party (especially the government) ought to have a say.

UPDATE And so does he.