主题：03/30/2009 Market View -- 宁子

Monday was not a good day for economic news, but it did not alter the nascent improvement showing up in the US data across a broad spectrum. The Monday news did not change what the data has shown. What it does show is worry by the market, investors, and even our overseas allies and partners as to the course we are taking.

Europe wonders what the heck we are doing.

We have reported that many of our European allies are asking our politicians, business leaders, and others just what the heck we are doing over here. They rely on our entrepreneurial, free-wheeling free enterprise system to produce the outsized gains it has always produced and thus finance the rest of the world's cheaper drugs and healthcare research, innovative technologies, and high standard of living to consume their goods. They don't want us to be like them, i.e. with stagnant GDP growth due to economies burdened by massive entitlements and social programs. They need us to fund their economies. As Daniel Hannan of the British Parliament says so passionately, stop with the national healthcare moves that are such a disaster in Europe. Stop with the move toward their socialism policies. It won't make them like us more. Europe likes us for what we are, i.e. our deep-seated mistrust of large centralized government. Indeed that is what we founded our country upon and yet we seem intent on a makeover into just the thing our Founding Fathers rebelled against and tried to avoid in drafting the separation of powers among the three branches of government.

Just how far are we going to go in abrogating the Constitution?

So, that left a lot of people Monday wondering why in the name of the Constitution was the President acting to remove the CEO of a private company, regardless of whether that company received public funds to bail it out. Where is it that the President tells a company it must merge with another company or else?

The administration says it favors bankruptcy. Then why didn't the Administration simply say 'sorry, your plans are not doing it for us, so no soup for you!' and let them file for bankruptcy? In bankruptcy court the judge would then, as per the law, make decisions as to the operation of the bankrupt entities. If the CEO needs replacing, that is the purview of the bankruptcy judge. It is not, and it is a massive, massive overstep of executive authority for the President to remove the officers of private companies. The precedent is catastrophically fatal to our system of government as it completely jettisons the Constitution and its grants of authority.

There was not a lot of outcry. Seems as if everyone is stunned by the extent of the power grab or they are just asleep at the wheel, willing to give up rights as they are too lazy to be ever vigilant as is required by our form of free government.

The market did speak up, however, and as it has consistently done when these extra reaches for power are announced. Everyone else needs to step up and speak out and look at things form a constitutional perspective or we will find ourselves with very few of the freedoms left that we have enjoyed for well over 200 years and that our forefathers have fought and died for along the way.