Author: Joe White

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Remembering the Victims of Communism – Hit & Run : Reason Magazine:

Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall was breached and Soviet communism, at long last, entered its death spiral.

After claiming approximately 100 million victims in the 20th century, communism was dismissed to the ash heap of history. But those who suffered under its boot heel have largely been confined to the history books when not forgotten altogether.

Author and historian Lee Edwards set out to correct this oversight with the creation of the Victims of Communism memorial and online museum, dedicated to those who perished because of Communist regimes between 1917 and 1989.

Reason.tv spoke to Edwards about the importance of historical memory, plans for a forthcoming bricks-and-mortar museum in Washington, DC, and the paintings of Ukrainian gulag survivor Nikolai Gettman, currently on display at the Heritage Foundation, where Edwards is a “Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought.”

Produced by Meredith Bragg and Michael C. Moynihan.

Oh, yeah!:

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So now the government wants to usurp the bankruptcy laws and directly seize troubled financial institutions. As Chidem Kurdas points out in Too Big to Fail Red Herring:

Scroll back to September 2008. Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy, the credit market seizes up and stocks tank. What difference would the proposed law make in that situation? Lehman management is out and shareholders are wiped out anyway. Instead of regular bankruptcy, where the creditors exert influence, government directly takes over.

So the difference is that lenders will no longer be able to enforce their contractual claims. Oh yes, that will be just the right remedy for a fragile credit market. You’ll tell lenders they’re toast! That will really get credit flowing.

No Right to Health Care Supplied by Others:

Genuine rights are negative, in the sense that they demand only that each of us refrains from harassing others. Because each unit of health care requires labor and resources for its production, no one can have a ‘right’ to health-care in the same way that she can have a right to speak freely or to worship the God of her choice. Enforcing Jones’s ‘right’ to health care necessarily means forcing Smith to work to produce this health care. A political ‘right’ that cannot even in principle exist without the confiscation of persons’ labor and property is no right at all; it’s a wrong.

I’m not sure about the phrasing of the first sentence (but I guess it is the same as applied to all people), but the rest rings quite true.

Commenting on the “pay czar”‘s decree that bailout recipient CEOs must cut their pay, Mario Rizzo observes:
We Have Come A Long Way « ThinkMarkets:

I am not here concerned with whether this is a good idea but I am simply in a state of naïve wonderment that we got to the point where this is legally possible.

Consider now the classic limited-government statements:

1. Powers given to Congress: “To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” (U.S. Constitution, Article I, sec.8, emphasis added.)

Comment: The list contains no reference to bailouts or pay czars.

2. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” (U.S. Constitution, Tenth Amendment)

3. James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, clarified the authority of the federal government in the Federalist Papers #45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.”

I know the constitutional history but sometime you just can’t believe it.

This is the world we lost.

The spiral continues.