Wednesday, March 18, 2009

I'm Waiting for the Constitutional Challenges

I'm only partially paying attention to the whole AIG bonus thingy. It doesn't really interest me and I'm not upset and yelling about it. Bonuses get paid out all the time to corporate bigwigs, both deserved and undeserved. $165M seems like a big number until you look at common practice. As for AIG taking government money, so what? Chris Dodd himself wrote language into the Stimuloid Porkgasm™ to allow such things to happen, so long as they were last year's bonuses, which these were.

What's bothering me is the ever-deepening level of government interference. We've now got government officials at all levels, all the way up to the President threatening to tax and sieze and grab in order to make things right in their eyes. There are no rules, no limits, nothing to stop their meddling.

They can rewrite mortgages - voluntary contracts between two private parties! - at will. They can stop corporate marketing efforts by fiat. They talk down banks and cause runs on their deposits. They can limit pay to employees. Now they're going to retroactively sieze bonuses from employees.

Aren't there rules that apply here? Can the government come in and simply blow contracts and agreements away on a whim? This is so destabilizing for the business world. Everything is up in the air. If I was running a business, I'd be slowly backing out the door, looking for a place to set up shop where there was stability and a respect for personal property.

It's not the bonuses or the greed that bother me, it's the never-ending spasms of interference. The effects of those go far beyond whatever industry is currently in the crosshairs of our childish leaders.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not just our leaders. There's a large number of people in general who are looking for somebody to blame. And when Grassley suggested that bankers, stockbrokers, etc. should apologize and either resign or kill themselves, it turned out a disturbingly large number of people only heard the "kill themselves" part, and some may be a little too quick to skip the "themselves" part.

The mood could turn very ugly very fast. It's a loaded pistol, and a lot of idiot "leaders" in both parties are picking it up and playing with it, and jokingly pointing it around and making "Bang, bang!" noises.

I am not happy about this. There's enough blame to go around that, once the lynchings start, it's not quite clear where they would stop. Or if they would stop.

Anonymous said...

Constitutional challenges? You haven't been paying attention. You should already know that the first two questions a court asks are, "what is the question before the court," and "what standing do you have" (or how have you been injured?).

Congress is actually writing into law just who can claim standing, and you can be sure that it's not going to allow the actual affected parties to complain.

If the idea of trampling over private business bothered you, you should be horrified that the Congress is deliberately locking out dissent.

I initially thought the problem was that nobody reads these bills (how hard would it be to look for the "none of this bailout money can be used to pay bonuses, junkets, bar tabs, or dry cleaning fees"), but when you see Dodd's language you realize that it's much, much worse.

The Dear Leader must be worried that people will see through this. Then what will his teleprompter tell him to say?

Dean said...

Linked!

Kelly the little black dog said...

I left you a response on my blog.