Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Taxpayers may despise Wall Street’s culture of greed, view bankers as amoral and abhor the idea of government bailouts. What they really can’t stand is watching the bailed-out banks throw their new-found wealth at their employees without getting a piece of the action.

President Barack Obama’s top advisers took up Main Street’s rallying cry on the Sunday morning talk shows last weekend. They sounded just plain silly deploring the banks for paying big bonuses and imploring them to stop lobbying and make loans.

It’s as if they expected the banks to be like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored (now government- controlled) enterprises that confused their public purpose (affordable housing) with private profit and served neither master well.

“They have responsibilities,” said Obama senior adviser David Axelrod on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and he wasn’t talking about banks’ obligations to shareholders. “They ought to do the things that they should to help this country, and that’s lending,” along with backing off on efforts to dilute financial reforms making their way through Congress.

Axelrod would like the banks to be more socially conscious and make loans based on need, not greed.

Over on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, was pitching the same spiel about banks’ “responsibility to the whole system,” complaining about the titans of the financial industry going back to business as usual, and fighting the regulations and reforms that will prevent a recurrence of the last crisis.

Shock, Not Awe

They can’t really be surprised about big payouts, can they? Feigned outrage, maybe, or populist pandering to show that they’re as angry as we are. If administration officials are really shocked to learn that Wall Street isn’t a social welfare agency, you have to wonder about their astuteness about Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“Clear thinking is in short supply,” said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse. Goals and motivation aren’t the same.

In a capitalist system, the motivation is the desire to earn a profit. Banks really do want to receive timely payment of principal and interest, recent evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. They are (theoretically) evaluating risk versus reward, with an eye toward the bottom line. (OK, so their risk models lacked any history on the effect of a nationwide plunge in home prices on new-fangled mortgage derivatives. No one’s perfect!)

Social Mission

Goals are a different story. They superimpose a social mission on top of what was a voluntary business transaction.

Sometimes goals are legislated, such as the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which was designed to eliminate the practice of redlining, or denying credit to residents of minority neighborhoods. The government held regulatory approval for bank mergers and acquisitions hostage to a specified volume of loans to inner-city residents.

Fannie and Freddie were pushed by their congressional overseers to lower their standards on loan purchases to promote affordable housing. But the private sector isn’t set up for socially responsible lending, according to Soss.

Soss referred me to the Gospel According to Luke and Jesus’s teaching that “you cannot serve God and Mammon,” the biblical term for material wealth.

Jesus may have been on to something well before the worldly philosophers started to espouse concepts like comparative advantage and rational self-interest.

Anger Management

Now that some of the major banks have repaid the government’s bailout money and are profitable again, what exactly does the public want? To the extent that bailouts of individual institutions were designed to save the financial system, we wanted -- we needed -- them to succeed.

Markets are functioning again, the economy expanded in the third quarter after four consecutive quarterly declines, according to economists’ forecasts, and stocks are up more than 50 percent since March. It’s nice to open the monthly 401(k) statement and see plusses in front of the changes.

Anger directed at bankers will only get you so far. Yes, the government used future taxpayer dollars to rescue the banks from themselves. There may have been better ways to structure the rescues. And maybe we should have had a bigger ownership stake than the one the government negotiated.

Who wouldn’t want to share in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s third-quarter profit of $3.19 billion and all future earnings?

Burden of Ownership

Unfortunately, a bigger ownership stake, with the government representing the taxpayer, comes with significant strings attached. Social goals start to motivate decision- making.

Mortgage modifications aren’t proceeding as quickly as the Obama administration would like? No problem, direct one of the government’s correspondent banks to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.

Politicized lending, either the generic type practiced by Fannie and Freddie or Countrywide’s more targeted style of extending sweetheart mortgages to members of key congressional committees, leads to no good. Most Americans, I’d venture to say, don’t want government involved in banking, or business, for that reason.

The notion that we saved the banks so they owe us is unrealistic and inconsistent with their mandate. Besides, they’ve helped us already. Rather than fanning the anger, Obama’s advisers could start by making this nuanced argument on the Sunday talk shows.

(Caroline Baum, author of “Just What I Said,” is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

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To contact the writer of this column: Caroline Baum in New York at cabaum@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 20, 2009 21:00 EDT