The Left believes the Left, and not the market, should determine compensation, value, pay. A grape picker gets $5 an hour? That's too little! A CEO making $5 million a year? That's too much! The employer and the employee can't make rational decisions on their own. Only the rational Left is equipped to make those decisions for them.

The Left is obsessed with other people's money. Just don't dare touch theirs. If they know what's best regarding your money, then certainly you should expect them to believe they know what's best about their own money, too. Just ask tax cheat Tom Daschle.

In addition to minimum-wage laws and onerous taxation rates for high earners, the Left has unveiled a plan to cap at $500,000 the compensation for CEOs of the failed companies they advocated subsidizing. The crime is not that these CEOs get paid too much, but that socialists in Congress took tax money to subsidize the pay of failed corporation heads in the first place. Had my plan been adopted, instead of the socialists' plan, many of these CEOs would now be out of work. Their companies, too inefficient to compete in a free market, would have gone out of business. That's too simple for a Left that's got it all figured out, so in addition to picking and choosing which companies to bail out, the Left wants to decide how much selected individuals working for those companies get paid annually.

Personally, I think $300,000 for a university's diversity commissar and $169,000 for a senator averse to showing up for work is way too high. But it might be hubristic of me to offer an arbitrary figure of what their ideal salaries should be. How would I know? The Left has no such compunction. They know best. And with regard to pay, it's no coincidence that the optimal salary for a bailout CEO is only slightly higher than the actual pay of the CEO of the federal government. How dare they make more money than the Chosen One?

For the Left, everybody makes too much money who makes more than them. Everybody makes too little money who makes less than them. The psychological claims envy and pity have over the Left would be harmless if leftists had no claims over the rest of us.

Exactly right.

Your readers might also be interested in my latest brief post, dealing with the larger issue of the "stimulus" plan: "The (Even) Great(er) Train Robbery"

Clearly, he's down with Other People's Property.

These are people who can do anything in the world as long as they’re doing it spending everybody else’s money. And that’s about all they’re good at.

So it doesn’t surprise when the Dems who concoct all of these grandiose government plans to get us into deeper and more extravagant debt have no desire to support charities or otherwise donate money from their personal income to any cause other than their own comfort.

Reading today about how the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bailout funds has come to the conclusion that the Treasury, through TARP, bought assets for $78 billion more than they were worth.

This is why the Feds should NOT be involved in trying to reconcile events in the free market. Especially as it’s no big thang’ to them to keep records or to understand the differences between good and bad transactions when they borrow or spend other people’s money.

Whether you agree with the bail out or not, if and when it occurs, the purpose of the money is to save the company and thus jobs and further the economy. It is not to line the pockets of failed executives. The men or women responsible should feel some pain. The taxpayers should not subsidize or reward the very people responsible for the state of the failure. Why should any regulations or limits be called socialism? Do you think capitalism is perfect?

I'm loosing a fighting battle. I don't know where to go, as I've done everthing in my power to save my small business that employs 7 people. Please help me save my business. A $5.00 donation from you, can help save one small business. Because I'm not a mega corporation, I am not big engough for the government to see, or care to help. Bail-outs are just for Big Business, eventhough 90% of small business make up the economy, and employ 85% of the workforce. So I'm now reaching out to my fellow Americans, and asking for People to help People.

Any size contribution will be appreciated.
Please endorse check or money order to:
ComTec Company
Address: 2505 paradise Circle,Plainfield, IL 60586

Thank you, And, I promise, I will pay-it-forward.

Best regards,
Deb Brzostowski

Valid points, and I was one of those shouting loudest that the bailout proved that the GOP is now a communist party, but I've got to say that the Left has finally got it right, even if not for the right reason. Companies that take taxpayer funding deserve to be punished for it. Yes, these companies weren't responsible for the bailout; Congress and George Bush were, and for that, they deserve to spend eternity swimming in a lake of fire. But the lesser evildoer is still an evildoer. These companies took an ill-gotten gain, and the taxpayer is aching for revenge.

Congress should be punished, but it won't be (at least not in this life); the companies, too, should be punished--and they can be. So punish them. Someone besides the taxpayer has to suffer. True, punishing those less responsible (the companies) while not punishing those more responsible (Congress) is unequal justice, but unequal justice is better than no justice. I just can't support letting these companies get away with giving huge buckets of taxpayer money as bonuses to people who didn't deserve that money. Again, someone's gotta pay.

Bottom line: government should not be involved in the free market economy.

Government is inefficient and produces nothing without using other people's money and should allow private businesses to conduct business whether they succeed or fail.

I they haven't learned anything from the housing debacle they will never learn. Not that they want to necessarily because the bureaucrats are more than happy to dig in where they have no business digging.

But consider that when the government (read: the Dems) started to muck with the housing market, it became artificially inflated and when the market could not support the weight of the inflated prices (in combination with bad loans and defaults) it collapsed.

Now the Feds want to prop the market up by legitimizing those artificially inflated prices at a point when the market has self adjusted and we are where we should be in terms of corrected real estate values.

Government intervention is typically a recipe for disaster and the bailouts and this so-called “Stimulus” package will follow suit.