In Greek mythology, Sisyphus the king of Ephyra was punished for his deceitfulness by being condemned to roll an enormous rock to the top of a hill, watch it roll down the other side, and then roll it back up, FOREVER.

Sisyphus is alive and well, it turns out, only now he lives in the White House.

You may recall, Dear Reader, the loud complaints by rich guys living in tony suburbs that banks were “redlining,” i.e., refusing to lend in neighborhoods inhabited primarily by deadbeat bums of particuar ethnic compositions. In response, great humanitarians like Congressman Barney Frank blackmailed the banks into making mortgage loans to the deadbeats. Unsurprisingly (except to idiots like Alan Greenspan and Paul Krugman) the mortgage lending sector of the economy cratered in 2008 when the deadbeats quit paying. Reacting to this crisis, other great humanitarians like Chris Dodd allied themselves with Frank the Pudgy to ramrod a law through Congress now popularly known as the Dodd-Frank Bill, or Dodd-Frank for short.

Dodd-Frank is a typical new age regulatory pain in the butt, but that is not its great failing from the point of view of the Obamaniacs. No, no. Dodd-Frank incorporates the outrageous requirement that banks only give mortgage loans to folks who have the capacity to make their monthly mortgage payments.

Heresy!

The banks actually started to obey the law, with the result that the deadbeat bums could not get mortgage loans to purchase houses they could not afford. So a great cry went up in the land, with much weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and shrieks of racism/sexism/islamophobia/rich bastards/etcetera. which brings us to King Sisyphus.

Our masters in D.C. have now started screaming at the banks to make more loans to deadbeats. Again. Of course, they couch this demand in innocuous camoflage, such as “relax lending standards for the underserved.” The subtext of this message is, of course, “Lend money to the folks who vote overwhelmingly for us or we will indict you for showing some intelligence and tax you out of existence.”

So here we are again. The gummint, which has already flushed hundreds of billions of your tax dollars down the sewer of bank bailouts, is busily creating the next financial collapse. Of course, we don’t need to worry about that. Our Europhilic administration will just take a page from the Cyprus playbook and confiscate all our bank accounts to pay for the next bailout.

Fast forward to 2015. Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and everybody else will have consolidated into the Universal Bank, which is 123% owned by the Feds. The Federal Reserve, still run by Prince Professor Benjamin Bernanke, will permit you to download as much money as you wish from the website www.freemoneyfromtheidiots.com as long as you click on the button labelled “I agree to pay this back someday if I feel like it.” Homebuilders, now converted into indentured servants and forbidden on pain of death from withdrawing from the home-building business, will be required to accept your downloaded funds, and will be forbidden from selling any house at a price above that charged for the average house in 1947.

But you, Dear Reader, will continue to work hard, creating the wealth that will be immediately confiscated and given to the more deserving.

Welcome to Paradise.