deal with the devil

Do we really want to go down this path:

The new legislation, the “Pay for Performance Act of 2009,” would impose government controls on the pay of all employees — not just top executives — of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

…

The measure is not limited just to those firms that received the largest sums of money, or just to the top 25 or 50 executives of those companies. It applies to all employees of all companies involved, for as long as the government is invested. And it would not only apply going forward, but also retroactively to existing contracts and pay arrangements of institutions that have already received funds.

In addition, the bill gives Geithner the authority to decide what pay is “unreasonable” or “excessive.” And it directs the Treasury Department to come up with a method to evaluate “the performance of the individual executive or employee to whom the payment relates.”

This proposed bill would cover all corporations who accepted money from TARP (as listed here), in addition to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in addition to any other corporation or company in whom the federal government has a financial stake (some are listed here, but this is not an all-inclusive list, and may overlap with the previous one).
So… remind me where in the Constitution it says that the federal government can set the wages for private-sector employees? Remind me where the Constitution authorizes the government to bail out failing corporations? Remind me where the Constitution permits the national government to make hiring and firing decisions for companies?
The government never should have performed any of these anti-free-market “bailouts” with our tax money. To add insult to injury, those bailouts were granted with effectively no strings, and now politicians are attempting to retroactively change the rules on the recipients – recipients who were forced to take the money, mind you. I would make a joke about Darth Vader’s “I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further,” comment, but this situation just stopped being funny.
How is this Constitutional? How is this legal? How is this even socially acceptable? We are charging headlong into the very definition of socialism, and this is somehow the “right” thing to do?
I think not.
Hat tip to Simon Jester.