Why do some people want power over the lives of others?

Theodore Dalrymple writes in a discussion of privileged eduction in France and whether the state should provide ‘equality of opportunity’ – which is to say, a discussion of socialist thinking – that he is mystified by this question.

The heart of the problem lies in the unassailability of the term ‘equality of opportunity,’ and the unthinking assent it commands. I was once asked on Dutch TV whether I was in favour of it, the interviewer assuming that I must be so in spite of all my other appalling opinions; and when I said that I was not, and indeed that I thought it was a truly hideous notion, his eyes opened with surprise. I thought he was going to slip off his chair.

Only under conditions reminiscent of those of Brave New World could there be equality of opportunity. But, of course, the very unattainability of equality of opportunity (in any sense other than that of an absence of formal, legal impediments to social advance) is precisely what recommends it as an ideal to politicians such as President Sarkozy, and indeed to most other western politicians, virtually irrespective of their putative political stripe. The fact that, reform notwithstanding, there are always differences in outcomes for different groups or classes of human beings in any society means that there is always scope, in the name of equality of opportunity, for further interference and control by politicians and bureaucrats. Not permanent revolution (to change the communist metaphor from Stalinism to Trotskyism), but permanent reform is the modern western politico-bureaucratic class’s route to lasting power and control.

Why anyone should want lasting power and control is to me a mystery: I suppose it must be the answer to a deep and insatiable inner emptiness.

And Bill Whittle at PJTV (here) seeks an answer to the question: ‘What type of person wants to run for office?’ He cites two men in history who attained supreme power and did not cling to it. Each of them saw his position as a temporary job, the exercise of power as a duty he owed to the people, and when he had done what was needed, stepped down from high office and returned to private life. One was the (5th.century B.C.E.) Roman leader Cincinnatus, and the other was George Washington.

If there are any politicians now who consider taking on elected office only as a service, they would be found (and it’s really not very likely that they exist) on the conservative right. Leftist politicians want above all to command, manipulate, control people, even force them to change their nature. There’s an old and ongoing debate among political philosophers of the left as to whether The Revolution will bring about a transformation of human nature, or whether it is necessary for human nature to be reconstructed first in order for The Revolution to be accomplished. (An infamous example of a Commie who fretted over this artifiical problem is Herbert Marcuse, guru of the 1968 New Left in Europe.)

Right now, ‘progressive’ bureaucrats in New York see it as their  business – and of course their pleasure – to interfere not just in New Yorkers’ but the whole nation’s private lives by dictating what people may eat or not eat.

Daniel Compton writes in OpenMarket.org:

On Monday, city officials rolled out an initiative to curb the salt content in manufactured and packaged foods. But the idea behind it — that salt intake has reached extreme levels in America — is a myth, and this “solution” wouldn’t work, anyway.

City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley aims to lead a national campaign to reduce the amount of salt in manufactured foods by 25 percent over the next five years. Cutting salt intake is supposed to reduce hypertension-related health problems. But while doctors may advise particular patients to cut down on salt, the science tells us that this is not a public-health problem. …

In other words, Farley’s trying to fight a problem that doesn’t exist. Worse, his new guidelines say that daily sodium intake for most people shouldn’t exceed 1,500 mg — which is a ridiculous 45 percent below the bottom of the normal consumption range [a] UC Davis study identified, and a full 60 percent lower than the worldwide average. …

The UC Davis study also cites surveys showing that sodium intake in the United Kingdom has “varied minimally” over the last 25 years, despite a major government campaign to reduce it.

Overall, the researchers found, salt intake “is unlikely to be malleable by public policy initiatives,” and attempts to change it would “expend valuable national and personal resources against unachievable goals.”

The New York guidelines are voluntary — for now. But the city’s ban on trans fats started that way, too. And the federal Food and Drug Administration has also been looking to get in on the action — it may classify it as a “food additive,” subject to regulation, sometime this year.

Then he comes to what all this regulation-for-our-own-good is really all about:

But this campaign isn’t about public health — it’s about grandstanding on a pseudo-issue ginned up by activists, when science clearly shows that there’s neither a crisis nor a way for the government to actually alter our salt intake.

All these initiatives do is win headlines for ambitious policymakers (New York’s last health commissioner parlayed his trans-fat activism into a promotion to FDA chief), while making food slightly more costly and leaving a bad taste in the mouths of consumers — literally.

Of course, if (or is it when?) the state is the sole provider of health care, it will claim justification for dictating to us what we may eat and how we must live, on the grounds that as it pays for our cures it has the right or the duty to instruct us to stay healthy. That’s why Obama and the Democrats so desperately want their health care legislation to be passed: not really to help keep us alive, but to have the means and the pretext for controlling us. As always with the left, they will boss us about in the name of a benign intention and an essential need.

The despotic personality is hard if not impossible for libertarians to understand. Individualists are appalled by the totalitarian vision of collectivists. Speaking for ourselves, in no conceivable circumstances would we want to organize a community. We find in the weakness of our unreconstructed human nature that it’s hard enough to run even one life – each our own.

Commenting on our post below, America gets a Council of Governors – for what?, one of our readers, Neitrick, provides this ominous information:

Even scarier…..a coworker of my husband’s just this week said that one of the reasons he chose to leave the military after two tours in Iraq was the shift in training exercises. According to him they had been doing training exercises in replicas of Iraqi villages but in April switched. They are now training US military in replicas of US suburbs. I found that information terrifying of not all that surprising. In light of this article, all I can do is hope people wake up to what’s coming.

… or ‘Holdering  justice’  – seems to amount to the same thing.

With Attorney General Eric Holder at the head of it, the US Justice Department would be better named the Injustice Department.

This from the Washington Times shows why:

The Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday rejected by a 15-14 vote a resolution of inquiry that would have forced the Justice Department to tell Congress why it dismissed a civil complaint against members of the New Black Panther Party who disrupted a Philadelphia polling place in the November 2008 election.

The party-line vote had been sought by Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, who, along with Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said they have been unable to get information from the department on the complaint’s dismissal.

“I am deeply disappointed that the Judiciary Committee defeated my resolution of inquiry on a party-line vote. There has been no oversight, no accountability and certainly no transparency with regard to this attorney general and this Department of Justice,” Mr. Wolf said. “Where is the ‘unprecedented transparency’ that this administration promised? Where is the honesty and openness that the majority party pledged? The American people deserve better,” he said….

Rep. Dan Lungren, California Republican, described the dismissal of the complaint as “a denial of justice” and Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte, Virginia Republican, said the resolution was an attempt to hold the Justice Department accountable to Congress.

The 15 Democrats, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, sent the resolution to the House floor with an adverse recommendation, voting it “unfavorably” out of committee. …

Mr. Wolf said that after ignoring seven letters over seven months seeking information on the case and failing to comply with subpoenas from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, he decided to seek the resolution. He said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. continues to “thwart all efforts to compel an explanation for the dismissal.” …

Mr. Wolf, ranking Republican on the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice, science and related agencies that funds the Justice Department, also said that while the Justice Department is claiming broad privileges to avoid disclosing any new information regarding the case, many legal scholars have challenged the department’s assertions of privilege. He said the committee’s failure to approve his resolution had set a “troubling precedent.”

“Is it going to continue to blindly defer to all unsubstantiated claims of privilege from the department?” he asked. “The Justice Department has gone as far as to claim privilege and redact seven pages of a letter I sent to the attorney general and released publicly on July 31, 2009.

“I sincerely question the judgment of the Civil Rights Division leadership — both in its dismissal of this case and its stonewalling of this Congress and the Commission on Civil Rights,” he said.

Mr. Wolf argued that the complaint was “inexplicably dismissed” earlier this year over the objections of the career attorneys overseeing the case as well as the departments own appeal office. He said he regretted resorting to an oversight resolution, but “Congress and the American people have a right to know why this case was not prosecuted.” …

Marxists, Greens, collectivists, call them what you will, are trying to convince us that national sovereignty is a nasty old thing of the past, and the way to the future happiness of the human race is through ‘transnationalism’ and global government. This opinion may be held by very few people, but they wield a lot of power. One of them is Barack Obama.

Frank Gaffney writes this on ‘international opinion’ and its effects:

International-law professors, jurists, and bureaucrats announce some piety that they think everyone should follow (e.g., the death penalty is an unconscionable human-rights violation). Once enough of them have followed it for long enough (in recent years, ‘long enough’ seems to have become ‘ten minutes’. . . or the time it takes to announce these new international standards), the piety is deemed – at least by transnationalists – to be universally binding. In their view, it thus becomes the obligation of every nation to fall into line, changing their laws to whatever extent is necessary to do so. That is, the sensibilities of the ‘international community’ (i.e., the elites of the global Left) void the democratic self-determinism of the American people.” …

In giving Interpol carte blanche, the transnationalists in the Obama administration – a group that includes, notably, State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh, UN Ambassador Susan Rice and, not least, the President himself – have sliced away at the corpus of American sovereignty. They have done so in order to ensure that America conforms to the same standards as the other nations that host Interpol offices (namely, Third World nations like Cameroon, El Salvador and Zimbabwe),

Unfortunately, the Transies are whacking away at our rights and liberties in a host of other ways, as well. The administration wants to subject the United States to: the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which would allow (among other travesties) international regulation of U.S. air and water, even in the absence of the sort of climate change treaty sought at Copenhagen; the International Criminal Court, exposing our officials, troops and citizens to capricious, politicized foreign prosecution; radical “international norms” governing what the UN considers to be the “rights” of women and children; and a Shariah-mandated Islamic blasphemy code barring and criminalizing speech that offends Muslims, a blatant threat to the First Amendment.

Even if these myriad “cuts” were not in the offing, there would be powerful reasons for rejecting Team Obama’s efforts to expand Interpol’s powers in the United States. Towards the end of last year, the Islamic Republic of Iran enlisted Interpol in its campaign to intimidate, hunt down and, if possible, silence its opponents outside the country. Ten Kurds who became Swedish citizens after fleeing Iran twenty years ago are now on the international police organization’s wanted list – and at risk of arrest if they leave Sweden. The basis for these charges? Nothing more than Tehran’s unproven and highly political accusations that they have been involved in “terrorism” and “organized crime.”

Whether such abuses might be made more likely in America if this order is not rescinded or countermanded by Congress can only be speculated about at this point. What is unmistakable, though, is the cumulative effect of the thousand cuts being inflicted by the Obama transnationalists: a perilous bleeding out of the liberties and freedoms enshrined in and protected by our Constitution and sovereignty.

And here’s part of a report from PowerLine of  John Bolton’s keynote speech at the Hudson Institute’s ‘Reclaim American Liberty’ Conference:

Ambassador Bolton argued that several elements have combined to induce President Obama to enroll in the essentially European project of global governance. Among these elements are Obama’s … sense that America is too powerful, and his desire to eschew old-fashioned patriotism in favor of a “post-American” presidency.

Although Obama is constrained by domestic political considerations from fully articulating his preference for ceding sovereignty in favor of global governance, Bolton finds clear evidence of that preference on several fronts. Obama’s approach to “climate change” is perhaps the clearest example. Climate change is the main issue through which the “global governance” crowd seeks to gain power. Far from resisting this attack on our right of self-governance, Obama has sided with the Europeans. …

Bolton also cited our approach to preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. With respect to North Korea and Iran, we have deferred to the “global community” and now rely on a policy of begging these countries to negotiate with us. …

Thanks to an anonymous hero who published the ‘Climategate’ emails – and also, grudgingly on our part, to China – the Copenhagen Plot failed. But the ‘Transies’ won’t give up. Stay alert for whatever new ruses they think up to nudge us towards world government.

What could explain why these American women are seeking an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood?

We can think of no answer but ignorance and stupidity – and possibly also sheer malice.

From David Horowitz’s Newsreal:

As Americans keep a wary eye on Muslim radicals in Yemen, little attention is being given to a far more dangerous enemy right in our own backyard. Under the banner of ‘anti-war’ activism, the radical group Code Pink is running banner advertisements on the English language version of the official Web site of a terrorist sympathizing group, the Muslim Brotherhood, one of which invites the Muslim Brotherhood to “join us in cleansing our country.”

The ad is entitled ‘Arrest The War Criminals.’ Only problem is, Code Pink believes the war criminals are none other than George W. Bush and Co. And they’re actively recruiting radical Muslim terrorists to help them in their cause.

A link on the ad goes to a web site that actually calls for the kidnapping of former President George W. Bush, his wife Laura, his family, and various former administration officials. To date, not a peep has been heard from the Secret Service.

Maybe that’s because Jodie Evans, the co-founder of Code Pink was a top fundraiser for Barack Obama. Or maybe not.

This isn’t the first time the rabid feminist anti-war group has had amicable ties with terrorists. As Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government reports:

“The Muslim Brotherhood published a statement by Code Pink issued in May to promote Code Pink’s trip to Gaza that month. In December, the Muslim Brotherhood published an open letter to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak by Code Pink and the Gaza Freedom March decrying the Egyptian government’s refusal to allow the group passage into Gaza.”

Once again, yet another radical group is discovered to have close ties to President Obama….

Most alarming …  is the absolute media silence…. The media ‘watchdogs’ are asleep and the ones we trust to protect us are instead offering aid and comfort to our enemies when they’re not prosecuting Navy Seals, CIA officials and anyone else whose job is to keep America safe.

We invite our readers to ponder this information:

From CNS News:

The State Department has awarded 1,011 special “diversity visas” allowing Yemeni nationals to immigrate to the United States since 2000, the year 17 U.S. sailors were killed when the USS Cole was attacked by terrorists in the Yemeni port of Aden.

The “diversity visas” are designed to encourage immigration from countries that do not otherwise send significant numbers of immigrants to the United States.

The State Department roster of all countries whose nationals have received “diversity visas” to immigrate to the United States in 2010, for example, shows that 2 of these immigrants will be from Luxembourg, 3 from the Solomon Islands, 4 from French Guiana, 5 from Reunion, 6 from Cape Verde, 7 from Malta, 8 from Guinea-Bissau, 9 from Comoros, 10 from Suriname–and 72 from Yemen. Nationals of the four states listed by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism–Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria–also received “diversity visas” from the State Department to immigrate to the United States in 2010. These include 98 from Syria, 298 from Cuba, 1,084 from Sudan, and 2,773 from Iran.

That the U.S. would encourage immigration from Yemen during the past decade is of interest because of the terrorist problem in that country.

Of interest? Or is it, maybe, scandalous?

Yemen has long been a focus of U.S. security concerns because of terrorist activities there, including not only the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole but also a 2008 bombing attack on the U.S. embassy. Recently, the concerns about terrorism eminating from Yemen has intensified because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who attempted to detonate explosive underwear on a Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, reportedly joined an al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen and was groomed there for his would-be suicide attack.

In his Saturday radio address, President Obama himself specifically pointed to Yemen as the country of origin from Abdulmuttalab’s terrorist plot, and on Sunday the State Department closed the U.S. embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa for fear of a terrorist attack. …

Winning applicants are selected at random by computer and sent a notification letter. They are given an interview date at the U.S. embassy or consulate in their country, and, if they pass the interview, are allowed to enter the United States as legal permanent residents. Examples of jobs that applicants can use in lieu of a high school diploma to qualify for the diversity visa lottery range from physicist and surgeon to librarian, park ranger, and choreographer.

What Americans aren’t prepared to risk to gain a few more choreographers isn’t worth mentioning.

A libertarian’s wish list: small government; no welfare; simple tax laws; a low flat rate of income tax; no capital gains tax; no estate tax.

But what America has is big government getting bigger, more intrusive, more controlling. The main instrument of its tyranny is the IRS, which the socialist regime is making ever more powerful.

This IBD editorial announces that within three years it will be illegal for anyone to help you prepare your taxes unless that person has been licensed by the federal government.

As if the Internal Revenue Service doesn’t have enough power, the agency says it will regulate tax preparers. And ObamaCare gives it even more clout.

Eric Hoffer, the great working class scourge of statist power, noted in his 1955 book, “The Passionate State of Mind,” that “There is a large measure of totalitarianism even in the freest of free societies.”

In America, the power to tax has always been recognized as the deadliest tool of the tyrant. Edmund Burke, the great British parliamentarian, in 1775 said the American colonies’ “love of liberty” was “fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing.”

According to this early sympathizer to the American cause, “Liberty might be safe or might be endangered in twenty other particulars without their being much pleased or alarmed.” But on taxes, “Here they felt its pulse, and as they found that beat they thought themselves sick or sound.”

Considering Americans’ innate sense of the relationship between taxation and freedom, it’s startling to read international taxation expert and legal historian Charles Adams’ account of the evolution of income tax collection.

As Adams points out in his history of taxes from antiquity to the modern era, “For Good and Evil,” “in the tax system of the 1950s no bank informed the IRS about customers’ affairs. Interest was not reported, withdrawals of cash were not reported” and neither were real estate sales, stock and dividend transactions, nor independent work now required by the 1099 form.

“Only wages were reported,” Adams points out, “and that was for the taxpayer’s benefit in order to claim a refund.” An IRS official would routinely “begin an audit with the comment that ours was an honor system, which is required in a free society.”

The honor is long gone — because the American people have felt the system’s pulse, diagnosing it sick as massive government wields illegitimate powers.

Enter IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, who announced Monday that within three years it will cease being legal to have your taxes prepared by someone unlicensed by the federal government. …

This comes when the Democrats’ health reform will be giving the IRS unprecedented new powers, such as judging which health plans are legal and tracking down those who try going without health coverage.

Most of us want to believe we enjoy the freest free society in history. But why is it that while we want the tax collector to have less power, the march of time always seems to give him more?

One of the sentimental theories dear to the leftist heart is that poverty causes crime. It is plainly untrue: most poor people are not criminals. Ideological levelers use it as an excuse for forcing whole societies into egalitarian straightjackets. Because the theory, or piety, is useful to them, they hang on to it however often and thoroughly it’s shown to be wrong. If they were right, crime would sink wherever poverty is alleviated by welfare provision, but what happens is the opposite: crime rises with the rise of welfare dependency.

What really does reduce crime – though socialists find the fact so intolerable they will continue to deny it in the teeth of all evidence – is the capture, conviction, imprisonment and punishment of criminals.

Heather Mac Donald, always clear thinking and accurate in research, demonstrates this in an article in the Wall Street Journal. The only thing she says that we would politely correct is that the theory arose in the 1960s (which was indeed a source of many stupid theories). Actually, it was big with ivory-tower intellectuals in the early twentieth century, and probably dates from even further back than that.

She writes:

The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the “root causes” theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.

The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.

The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.

If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration. Even law enforcement officials came to embrace the root causes theory, which let them off the hook for rising lawlessness. Through the late 1980s, the FBI’s annual national crime report included the disclaimer that “criminal homicide is largely a societal problem which is beyond the control of the police.” Policing, it was understood, can only respond to crime after the fact; preventing it is the domain of government welfare programs.

The 1960s themselves offered a challenge to the poverty-causes-crime thesis. Homicides rose 43%, despite an expanding economy and a surge in government jobs for inner-city residents. The Great Depression also contradicted the idea that need breeds predation, since crime rates dropped during that prolonged crisis. The academy’s commitment to root causes apologetics nevertheless persisted. Andrew Karmen of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice echoed Cloward and Ohlin in 2000 in his book “New York Murder Mystery.” Crime, he wrote, is “a distorted form of social protest.” And as the current recession deepened, liberal media outlets called for more government social programs to fight the coming crime wave. In late 2008, the New York Times urged President Barack Obama to crank up federal spending on after-school programs, social workers, and summer jobs. “The economic crisis,” the paper’s editorialists wrote, “has clearly created the conditions for more crime and more gangs—among hopeless, jobless young men in the inner cities.”

Even then crime patterns were defying expectations. And by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.

The recession crime free fall continues a trend of declining national crime rates that began in the 1990s, during a very different economy. The causes of that long-term drop are hotly disputed, but an increase in the number of people incarcerated had a large effect on crime in the last decade and continues to affect crime rates today, however much anti-incarceration activists deny it. The number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2008, from 300,000 to 1.6 million.

The spread of data-driven policing has also contributed to the 2000s’ crime drop. At the start of the recession, the two police chiefs who confidently announced that their cities’ crime rates would remain recession-proof were Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. As New York Police Commissioner in the mid-1990s, Mr. Bratton pioneered the intensive use of crime data to determine policing strategies and to hold precinct commanders accountable—a process known as Compstat. Commissioner Kelly has continued Mr. Bratton’s revolutionary policies, leading to New York’s stunning 16-year 77% crime drop. The two police leaders were true to their word. In 2009, the city of L.A. saw a 17% drop in homicides, an 8% drop in property crimes, and a 10% drop in violent crimes. In New York, homicides fell 19%, to their lowest level since reliable records were first kept in 1963.

The Compstat mentality is the opposite of root causes excuse-making; it holds that policing can and must control crime for the sake of urban economic viability. More and more police chiefs have adopted the Compstat philosophy of crime-fighting and the information-based policing techniques that it spawned. Their success in lowering crime shows that the government can control antisocial behavior and provide public safety through enforcing the rule of law. Moreover, the state has the moral right and obligation to do so, regardless of economic conditions or income inequality…

The recession could still affect crime rates if cities cut their police forces and states start releasing prisoners early. Both forms of cost-saving would be self-defeating. Public safety is the precondition for thriving urban life. In 1990s New York, crime did not drop because the economy improved; rather, the city’s economy revived because crime was cut in half…

It should always be remembered that the only absolutely necessary function of government is protection: of the nation by armed defense against foreign attack, and of individuals by means of the law.

Lending to borrowers who could not afford to buy homes was the root cause of the economic collapse which has plunged America into debt for generations to come.

Lending to borrowers who cannot afford to buy homes continues as before under the Obama administration.

Leading the dance of corruption is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The lords of the dance are Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.

The leader of the band is Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg.

Obama calls the tune.

Today at Townhall, Bruce Bialosky writes this about it:

[Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac], which together own or guarantee over one half of home mortgages, and which had previously been injected with a $111 billion bailout, received an unexpected Christmas present from the Obama Administration: an executive order, issued in the dark of the night … The Treasury announced they were eliminating the $400 billion limit available to these two entities – in essence giving them license to fritter away as much money as they want while the American people (and their grandchildren) pick up the tab…

The story gets even better. The top executives are in line to receive $6 million compensation packages for 2009. Apparently, the fact that Fannie Mae lost $56.9 billion and Freddie Mac has lost $14.1 billion in the first 9 months of 2009 did not stop the Obama Administration from approving these payments. The Treasury claims that the compensation meets the guidelines set out by Kenneth Feinberg, the Pay Czar; however, it appears that the minimum salaries of $900,000 far exceed the $500,000 limit that Feinberg had previously established.

Compensation of Fannie and Freddie executives has been suspicious for a long time. Typically, executives would be given huge pay packages, and then funnel some of the money back to their favorite politicians to impede the oversight process. Franklin Raines and James A. Johnson, two directors who received enormous sums of money, ran Fannie Mae into the ground only to be rewarded by the Obama Administration until political pressure forced them into private life.

Skepticism abounds as to why the Obama Administration would make such a move when we already have a $289 billion commitment for additional funding to underwrite losses from the twin entities. Treasury Secretary Geithner claimed that they just wanted to stabilize the mortgage market, but, if this was of such great importance and urgency, why was it done so secretively?

What seems to be missing is major reform of the lending practices. There’s no evidence that they’ve become more vigilant in their loan procedures, or more attentive to the credit-worthiness of the borrowers. In fact, it seems pretty clear that they have resumed their lending habits of old.

Proportional fault has never been placed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the subprime loan crisis.

Because these entities have been protected by Barney Frank in the House and Christopher Dodd in the Senate, the two lenders have escaped the kind of brutal public scrutiny visited upon banks and other lenders. While bankers have been on the hot seat and skewered by late night comedians, the people who run these behemoths have escaped unfazed.

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, law professor J. Kenneth Blackwell, and legal analyst Kenneth A. Klukowski write a clear, informative article on why the health-care bill is unconstitutional.

Read it in full here.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s health-care bill is now moving toward final passage. The policy issues may be coming to an end, but the legal issues are certain to continue because key provisions of this dangerous legislation are unconstitutional. Legally speaking, this legislation creates a target-rich environment. We will focus on three of its more glaring constitutional defects.

First, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to require that Americans purchase health insurance. Congress must be able to point to at least one of its powers listed in the Constitution as the basis of any legislation it passes. None of those powers justifies the individual insurance mandate…

It is one thing … for Congress to regulate economic activity in which individuals choose to engage; it is another to require that individuals engage in such activity. That is not a difference in degree, but instead a difference in kind. It is a line that Congress has never crossed and the courts have never sanctioned…

A second constitutional defect of the Reid bill passed in the Senate involves the deals he cut to secure the votes of individual senators… This selective spending targeted at certain states runs afoul of the general welfare clause.

A third constitutional defect in this ObamaCare legislation is its command that states establish such things as benefit exchanges, which will require state legislation and regulations. This is not a condition for receiving federal funds, which would still leave some kind of choice to the states. No, this legislation requires states to establish these exchanges or says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will step in and do it for them. It renders states little more than subdivisions of the federal government.

This violates the letter, the spirit, and the interpretation of our federal-state form of government… [T]he Constitution forbids the federal government from commandeering any branch of state government to administer a federal program. That is, by drafting and by deliberate design, exactly what this legislation would do…

This hardly exhausts the list of constitutional problems with this legislation, which would take the federal government into uncharted political and legal territory…

America’s founders intended the federal government to have limited powers and that the states have an independent sovereign place in our system of government. The Obama/Reid/Pelosi legislation to take control of the American health-care system is the most sweeping and intrusive federal program ever devised. If the federal government can do this, then it can do anything, and the limits on government power that our liberty requires will be more myth than reality.