How much can you earn? If you're a banker the Fed will determine that.
The Federal Reserve has
announced a policy that, not too many years ago, would have been
widely denounced as a tyrannical usurpation of power. The Fed is in
the process of drawing up “guidelines” to set limits on the
amount of compensation that can be paid to the upper management of
the nation's banks. This is in keeping with a White House policy of
setting limits on the pay for executives of banks which have taken
advantage of the TARP funds made available under what amounts to an
emergency decree by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen last
September. Yet, somehow, this direct interference with the workings
of the free market has not drawn the fire from so-called
conservatives that one would have expected. This strikes me as yet
another sign of just how little attention is paid to the Constitution
and the limits that it sets on the power of the Federal government
these days. Instead of vilifying this new assertion of unlawful
power on the part of the State the reaction seems to be, “Oh well,
this is merely a logical extension of the programs that have saved
our financial system from collapse”. There is also more than a
hint of class warfare in this move as the President seeks to further
establish himself as the savior of the poor and downtrodden.
This change in the Fed's regulatory scheme is a
continuation of the Obama regime's policy of punishing the wealthy by
capping the amount of money they may earn in the future. After all,
this is the same outfit that has placed caps on the amount of money
that may be earned by top management in the nationalized parts of the
U.S. auto industry known as General Motors and Chrysler. One of the
things that concerns me, besides the obvious unconstitutionality of
the moves to regulate the recompense of employees in the putatively
private sector of the economy, is the level of, there is no other
word for it, glee, which has met the Fed's announcement. This is but
one sign that the majority of the American people have bought into
the State's version of the causes of the events leading up to the
current economic crisis: the fault lies entirely with those greedy
bankers who were let loose to run amok by a Bush administration that
cared only for allowing its friends and supporters to make obscene
amounts of money. There seems to be little awareness that our
current financial problems were caused by a series of ill-considered
policies adopted by various agencies of the Federal government –
the same government which is now being trusted with
extra-constitutional powers to put things right.
What many Americans fail to realize is that, by
acquiescing in the imposition of wage caps for some they accept that
all may have their remuneration set by the State. Many will not
accept the truth of the last statement, preferring to believe in the
myth of a benevolent Federal government, a government which would
never act in such a way as to harm the people. However, history, if
it teaches us anything at all, teaches us that government power, once
established in an area of economic or social activity, continues to
expand. To take but one example, the Interstate Commerce Commission
was originally empowered only to regulate railroad freight rates.
Its powers eventually grew to encompass the trucking industry as well
as railroads and its field of activity grew to include such details
as what routes trucks could drive and what they were allowed to carry
on those routes. The railroads saw an even more drastic expansion of
the ICC's powers as it came to control the smallest details of the
freight rates the railroad could charge, how the roads were required
to do their accounting – though those methods failed to reflect the
actual costs incurred by the companies – and other details of
operations. The ICC grew so cumbersome and destructive of economic
activity that even the Congresscritters in Washington finally
realized that it was killing the freight industry, both trucks and
railroads, and its power were drastically cut in the early 1980s and
the commission itself eventually phased out, to be replaced by the
Surface Transportation Board. In a repeat of history Congress is now
considering expanding the powers of the STB to set railroad freight
rates. Representative James Oberstar (D-MN), chairman of the
Committee on
Transportation and Infrastructure has opened hearings about what he
calls the problem of freight railroads overcharging their customers.
Wherever one looks at government programs, particularly
those which regulate some sort of activity one sees the expansion of
those powers into areas that were not imagined in the original
legislation. Yet, the State's “education system” does a good job
of indoctrinating students with the idea that the Federal government
is the source of all goodness and wisdom. Thus, many people do not
acknowledge that the government is the source of a lot of their
problems, even in the face of considerable evidence that it is.
It doesn't take a genius to see the path that the
State will follow now that it has been allowed to establish wage caps
in a small section of the economy. At some time in the future the
Federal government will extend its new found powers and establish
wage limits for management in other sections of the economy, and the
workers will cheer because the “rich, fat cats” of management
will be seen as getting what is coming to them. Little will they
realize that they will be the next in line for having their incomes
limited. Anyone who has read Frederick Hayek's book The Road to
Serfdom will understand how this process is inevitable, unless
the people realize what is going on and act decisively to change the
course of their government. Forcing the Federal government back into
the constraints imposed on it by the Constitution will allow
Americans to recover their lost freedoms, including the freedom to
work for wages set by the free market, not by some bureaucrat in
Washington, D.C.