Profit is a dirty word, unless …

You ever notice how all those people who want to tell everyone else how to behave, the ones who are all for health care reform and subsidized renewable energy, have an aversion to profit?

They’re always pointing out the obscene profits of oil companies and insurance companies that could be better used by them instead of lining the pockets of greedy investors and company employees.

When I occassionally get the chance, I ask them: “Are you paid a salary? Is the salary in excess of subsistence? Isn’t that a profit?”

Now comes a couple of news items — they were in all the papers — that should open a few eyes of those who have put their trust in those guys from the government instead of those greedy capitalists.

Take a couple of editorials in a couple of the finer newspapers that get delivered to my home every morning.

An editorial in today’s Review-Journal notes that Social Security recipients are being told that since inflation has dipped to zero and below in some sectors they will get no cost of living adjustments for the next two years in their monthly checks. In fact, due to Medicare cost increases, most of those checks will shrink. But that’s OK, because that’s why it is called a cost of living adjustment.

(Don’t get me started on why that adjustment for the cost of living is calculated at the poverty level, but the same percentage is applied to members of Congress. Bad math.)

Then our editorial notes that our hard-working federal employees, too, will feel the pain of sacrifice and deprivation. Our president for hope and change has put his foot down and told federal employees their COLAs will be slashed from 2.4 percent to a paltry 2.0 percent.

Then we quote Squealer the Pig in Orwell’s “Animal House,” who altered the seventh commandment to read: "All animals are equal ... but some animals are more equal than others."

Then there is an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily that for the second time in a week shows just where we are headed in terms public vs. private pay.

Citing Cato Institute calculations, IBD rages:

“The hardworking taxpayers who pay federal salaries should be outraged by the administration's inconsequential curb on pay raises. With the economy still struggling and the jobless rate at almost 10%, hiring freezes, pay freezes and firings are common across the private sector.

“Yet civilian federal workers, who are almost impossible to fire for poor performance, are still getting raises on top of deals that are far better than those of their counterparts in the private sector.”

Extrapolate the lines on the two Cato charts below and then tell me about those obscene profits.