Another papal bull from the White House has been delivered and Mr. Obama has decreed that he wants to put a cap on charitable giving by the wealthy. This is to finance changes in our approaching socialized medicine, which, with WalMart and other big companies behind it, is likely to be rammed down our throats. No doubt WalMart is hot to make all Americans pay for its $4 prescription loss leaders. I'm going to Target, even if it is French.

Under the Obama plan, families making more than $250,000 a year would be capped at 28¢ on the dollar for itemized charitable deductions.

The biggest days for charities are the last ones of the year, when wealthy individuals decide how much they can give, to get it in on the current tax year. Now, with this limit, there will be less incentive, in fact 72% less incentive, to give this money. Leftists have said that it would make no difference to charities, citing, rightly or not, wrinkles in tax law, and ignoring, as usual, the people who make the deductions, because for the left the individual, although made much of, is merely a construct. Charitable giving will indeed go down drastically.

This is of course yet another assault on American freedom. The very essence of freedom is personal agency--if you want to give money to the American Cancer Society, it is your right to do so. If you want to give money to the Mortimer Snerd Buggy Whip Museum in East Sump Pump, Ohio, and it is an accredited charity, it is your right to do so, and still take the charitable deduction. But with this fiat the government will interpose itself, yet again, between one's volition and one's possible actions.

I have said for years that the raison d'être of modern liberalism is to unlink actions from consequences, and therefore to destroy one's sense of agency. This is servitude and people who impose servitude are your masters and owners.

The flip side of not being able to do what you what to do is not being made responsible for what you do do, and in both cases the government will put itself right in the middle, deciding what consequences follow from what actions--and the decisions will be purely political ones, instead of moral ones.

Think: a moral action is being wrested from you by a political decision made by an arrogant man in Washington who knows best.

When actions are rewarded or punished not by ethics but by politics, the successful are those who play the political game, which is, as we all know, the game of gaining power over other people. Virtue has very little to do with it. Virtue as traditionally virtuous people know it, and not the politicized construct of the virtuous person today. A successful political player is honest only insofar as he has to be to remain viable, politically or in the system which he is profiting from. There is no impetus to be an ethical person and indeed ethics can be a positive hindrance. In the entirely politicized system, check your conscience at the door.

The Obama White House has determined that even the human heart will be remade into the image of His O'liness. Charities will no longer by our own to choose but will instead be the choice of the government. A final test of the arrogance of this man is that he has decreed that his moral choices will become our moral choices.

Now, according to the Obama White House, charity does not begin at home.

A new low in American government. A new high in arrogance and conceit.