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Showing posts from October, 2009

Nancy, Are You Serious?

By Jake Towne Published 10/29/09 http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php Last week, the U.S. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, responding to a reporter's question of whether the Constitution gave Congress the authority to enact individual health insurance mandate, kept repeating, "Are you serious?" Now, let's give Speaker Pelosi the benefit of the doubt and attribute her impolite reply to simple disbelief. In fact, from her point of view her authority is unchallenged per a September press release, and many others such as Politico's Erwin Chemerinsky and even the contemporary Supreme Court agree. From her press release, Pelosi states: "The Constitution gives Congress broad power to regulate activities that have an effect on interstate commerce. Congress has used this authority to regulate many aspects of American life, from labor relations to education to health care to agricultural production. Since virtually every aspect of the heath care syst

Progressive Claptrap

By Robert Higgs You need a strong stomach to endure the messages disseminated by the mainstream news media, especially by its premier outlets, such as the New York Times. Of course, at this late date, nobody expects anything like political non-partisanship or sound economic analysis from the Times, yet one continues to hope that the writers will not flaunt their leftish sensibilities in an utterly buffoonish manner. If you happened upon a September 28 article “Europe’s Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn,” by Steven Erlanger, your hopes in this regard must have been violently shattered. Much might be said about the article’s main content, but I won’t get into that material here. What struck me comes right at the beginning in an explicit statement of the writer’s assumptions. The article begins well enough — splendidly, in fact — as its first sentence tells us, “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.” The next sentence, however, begins with the