Government goes vertical:
But what about the slippery slope? Well, it went totally vertical. On the very day that the government czar announced that he would cut the pay of companies that received taxpayer bailouts, the Federal Reserve announced that it would start regulating compensation at the thousands of banks that it regulates, as well as American subsidiaries of non-U.S. financial companies. Some state regulators said they planned to issue similar requirements for state-regulated banks not covered by the Fed plan.
All of this is being done without any legitimate power under the Constitution, and much of it without even the authorization of Congress. Congress refused to bail out the auto companies, so Bush did it on his own authority. Congress never authorized the Federal Reserve to regulate the pay of bank employees.
This is not a slippery slope. This is falling off a cliff. As one news story pointed out: “The restrictions were the latest in more than a year’s worth of government intervention in matters once considered inviolable aspects of the country’s free-market economy and represent a signal moment in the history of the American economic experiment.”
It’s amazing that the lesson so many Americans took from the fall of the Soviet Union appears to have been: “Well, if giant government worked for them….”