Now the Obama administration [1] wants to limit ‘executive’ pay across the private sector, not just [2] for companies receiving TARP funds. People were [3] warned this is the next step. This is crazy. The people in government who think this is an appropriate function of government skipped a few classes somewhere along the line — maybe they should google ‘enumerated powers’. They have no wisdom or insight, only power. [4] Corruption [5] empowers, and absolute corruption empowers absolutely. [6] Hayek warned us.

Do we really want some idiot in Washington deciding how much we earn, whether we get promoted, and ultimately who we work for? The ostensible  principle here is that companies, and by extension, people, are not competent  to decide how to allocate their resources, so people with guns helpful government bureaucrats must step in. The reality is that government, far from being competent to run our lives, is corrupt and incompetent.

Some folks said the TARP limits were justified because those companies came to the government “hat in hand” for help, and other folks nodded their heads. Now the excuse for the power grab is that companies do not act in their own “long-term” interest. When the limits are extended to lower and lower level employees, they will stop referring to “executives” and claim the government must control all salaries out of “fairness” — after all, why should my secretary earn more than the secretary next door? They, the leftist/statist/socialist/communist/progressive/fascists — call them what you will — believe there is no room for freedom in this country, and that “society”, by which they mean themselves, must decide what is fair. They have no idea how the economy operates, and they don’t care, because they cling to some mistaken concept of how it “should” run. They have no idea how wealth is created, and they don’t care, because they think [7] no one should be wealthy. They have a word for such a society: Utopia. (It means ‘nowhere’, but they think that’s ironic, not prophetic).

[8] Michael Moore, famed left-wing economist, now [9] wants to turn GM into a railroad and windmill company. Moore [10] once formulated a principle upon which he thought the economy should be based: no one should make anything they can’t afford to buy. So, no yachts. No luxury cars. Oh, and by the way, no buildings larger than the minimum construction worker can afford to buy. No airplanes larger than a kit plane. No railroads (I guess he’ll make an exception for high-speed rail). No factories. No oil wells. No power plants. No shipping containers and no ships. No MRI machines. No radio telescopes and no space stations.

The problem — apart from the simple fact that in this Utopia, life will be [11] poor, nasty, brutish, and short –  is that decapitating the economy starts a cascade. If no one is allowed to own a yacht or a Cadillac, then no one will be hired to make them, and those people will be thrown out of work. If no one is allowed to make a power plant, no one will have electricity. If there are no airplanes or railroads or ships, all your goods will have to be produced within walking distance. This is not some weird fevered right-wing chimera — this is social policy as formulated by Michael Moore and left-wing idols like [12] Mahatma Gandhi. Another description of Gandhi’s Utopia is “crushing poverty”. Think [13] Calcutta, not [14] Knightsbridge.

Hope and change, indeed. More like envy and disaster.

UPDATE: The Yahoo link to the original story is broken (as happens a lot with time-limited news stories), so I replaced it with a screen shot of the story. Sorry for the inconvenience.