On Wednesday, President Obama mandated that the pay of senior executives working for companies receiving bailout money be capped at $500,000 per year.

Obama, in justifying the bill, said, “what gets people upset — and rightfully so — are executives being rewarded for failure. Especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.”

To fully understand the utter stupidity of this idea, let’s apply the same principle to another situation.

Say, for example, there was a university football team with a highly paid coach — we’ll call him Gene Chizik. Let’s also say this particular team had gone downhill since the coach took over, going 5-and-19 in its last two seasons.

According to our genius president’s philosophy, that university’s best course of action would be to cap the pay of the entire coaching staff at just a fraction of its former level, say at $50,000 per year.

Were this to happen, we would end up with someone like me taking over the job. Someone who is completely unqualified to coach a Big 12 college football team would be in charge of calling all the shots. And I can guarantee we wouldn’t even beat South Dakota State if that were to happen.

The reason for this is all of the good coaches would be off somewhere else where they could make more money in return for their services.

Luckily for us, our athletic department is smarter than our president, and didn’t decide to pay our coaching staff next to nothing. That’s because, although Obama seems to believe he knows more about how to run a billion-dollar business than people who have spent their entire lives running billion-dollar businesses and have millions of dollars of personal stake in them, Jamie Pollard doesn’t believe he can coach a football team better than a professional football coach. Maybe we should have elected him instead.

But what do you do when you find yourself trapped with a Gene Chizik type, who isn’t worth their pay? It happens sometimes. You will occasionally get an incompetent executive or coach no matter how much you pay. This brings up the notion of severance packages — sometimes known as golden parachutes — which Obama’s mandate will also eliminate. As he said, “We’re taking the air out of golden parachutes.”

This is also a bad idea. Economist and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University Thomas Sowell said, “If the CEO’s decisions are costing the company billions, it is a bargain to get him out the door immediately for millions, rather than having his departure delayed by either internal struggles or battles in the courts. It is the same principle if you are married to someone who is impossible to live with. The divorce may cost far more than the marriage — and still be worth every cent of it.”

It works the same with football. Sometimes it’s worth it to pay a bad coach to leave if it means they’ll go quickly and quietly. That’s why contracts come with a price to buy them out.

Obama said it is not right for the taxpayers’ bailout money to go to these executives, so as a result, he mandates that these firms can’t pay what they need to hire the type of people who could fix things.

Because of the bailout, Obama is able to justify an extremely Marxist agenda, and because of class envy, we will let him get away with it.

He is using your money to buy power. The $700 billion that was taken from us is being used as an excuse to begin nationalizing the business sector by assuming control over the industries that were affected by the bailout — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Obama administration has already said it plans to propose restrictions — such as requiring top executives at financial institutions to hold stock for several years before they can cash out, according to a Feb. 4 AP article — on companies who are receiving no government assistance whatsoever.

If we as Americans don’t soon catch on to what our government is doing, it could be the end of the capitalist system our country has gotten so used to.

– Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering and economics from DeWitt.