I shit you not. The executive branch of the federal government is going order private companies to cut the amount of money they’re charging to borrow money. Order. Because apparently we’re a socialist country now.

The Obama administration plans to overhaul how it’s tackling the foreclosure crisis, in part by requiring lenders to temporarily slash or eliminate monthly mortgage payments for many borrowers who are unemployed, senior officials said Thursday.

Banks and other lenders would have to reduce the payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower’s income, which would typically be their unemployment insurance, for up to six months. In some cases, administration officials said, a lender could allow a borrower to make no payments at all.

The era of personal responsibility and free markets is evidently over. It was a nice 234-year run though, huh?

The new push, which the White House is scheduled to announce Friday, takes direct aim at the major cause of the current wave of foreclosures: the spike in unemployment. While the initial mortgage crisis that erupted three years ago resulted from millions of risky home loans that went bad, more recent defaults reflect the country’s economic downturn and the inability of jobless borrowers to keep paying.

So the same government whose policies brought those higher unemployment numbers will now further interfere in the market place by harming the bottom line of businesses. Which should lead to further layoffs in the banking and mortgage sector, meaning more people unable to pay their own mortgages. It’s a cycle of stupidity.

The administration’s newest push also seeks to more aggressively help borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, by encouraging lenders to cut the loan balances of millions of these distressed homeowners and possibly refinance into loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration. The problem of so-called “underwater” borrowers has bedeviled earlier administration efforts to address the mortgage crisis as home prices plunged.

The new initiatives are expected to take effect over the next half year and will be funded out of money remaining in the $700 billion bailout program for the financial sector, administration officials said. They said no new taxpayer funds would be needed.

That was the $700 billion bailout that we needed immediately to save the economy, which evidently still hasn’t been spent, instead being used as a slush fund by Washington to do whatever it wants.

And so the reckless policies of the Obama Administration somehow get even more reckless.