Free Republic

Laurence Tribe writes in today's New York Times regarding the health care law: Since the New Deal, the court has consistently held that Congress has broad constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. This includes authority over not just goods moving across state lines, but also the economic choices of individuals within states that have significant effects on interstate markets. By that standard, this law’s constitutionality is open and shut. Quite so; but what Tribe forgets is that the constitution is a living document. The constitution's meaning is not fixed by the New Deal. The constitution evolves to meet the needs...

A health care bill to expand Medicare and increase taxes to pay for it passes both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate by wide margins and is signed by the President. Most people who are paying attention think that, for good or ill, this expansion of government will be with us forever. But just 17 months later, the law is repealed. Whereas it was passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 328 to 72, the same House, with only a slight change of membership, votes 360 to 66 to repeal the bill. The new President,...

So it turns out that the cure for “epistemic closure” is great quantities of crystal meth. The things you learn from Grover Norquist. In case you missed it, Norquist came down like a runaway gravel truck on Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, a favorite around these parts. Governor Daniels’s offense was declaring himself open to the possibility that a value-added tax might be an acceptable part of a wide-ranging reform of the federal tax system. Norquist replied, in a Politico interview: “This is outside the bounds of acceptable modern Republican thought, and it is only the zone of extremely left-wing Democrats...

One of the reasons birthers demand to see Obama's long-form birth certificate (as opposed to the short form already released) is that only the long-form lists the hospital. Why is the hospital important? Well, birthers claim that if his birth was registered as having taken place at home, then it opens up the possibility that his birth was registered fraudulantly. That is, if he were born in Kenya, his grandma could have gone down to the local registrar, committed perjury by swearing she whitnessed his birth at home in Hawaii, and obtained a birth certificate saying he was born in...

The origin of modern myths and legends is a side interest of mine, the birther myths among them. Now I understand why Obama being born in Kenya made it into your belief system, despite it being physically impluasible (requiring around 5 days and five flights, most on propeller planes) and financially impossible (it would have cost about a year of her parents' combined salaries) for Stanley Ann & Obama Sr. to travel there for her to give birth. After all, Obama's Father was from Kenya, so if you are going to make up a myth about Obama being born abroad,...

Now this is surprising: According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, about one in three so-called "birthers" - those who erroneously believe President Obama was born outside of the United States - nonetheless approve of the president's job performance. Fourteen percent of those surveyed in the poll volunteered that Mr. Obama was born in another country, a figure that rose to 20 percent when pollsters explicitly offered that as a possibility. That means roughly one in five Americans could be considered a birther, according to the poll. It showed that about one in three conservatives and Republicans believe the...

Now, eight years later, three Georgia legislators are indulging the fantasies of a new contingent of conspiracy theorists who believe in a different cover-up. These conspiracy theorists, or “birthers,” refuse to accept the constitutional eligibility of President Barack Obama, under the hypothesis that he might not have been born in Honolulu, and that he instead may have engaged in a five-decade-long ruse before his secret foreign birth was exposed via fabricated rumors spread by fringe bloggers with no evidence late in the campaign.The conspiracists’ favored theory is that Obama’s mother left her Honolulu home and traveled halfway around the planet...

I’m not talking about Barack Obama’s “long form” from Hawaii. We all know that Hawaiian law prevents us mere mortals from putting our paws on that document. No, I’m asking where is his Kenyan birth certificate. Unlike Hawaii, Kenyan law says that birth information is open to anyone! Cap 149 Births and Deaths Registration: 26.(1) Any register, return or index in the custody of the Principal Registrar subject to the rules, shall be open to inspection on payment of the prescribed fee.(2) The Principal Registrar shall, on payment of the prescribed fee, furnish a certified copy of any entry in...

“Inspector” Lucas Smith claimed in comments on YouTube to have examined all newspaper birth announcements from August through December of 1961, not finding the birth announcement of the Nordyke twins (born at the same hospital as President Obama, one day later). Whether not finding was through oversight or fraud, the birth announcement is there in the newspaper on August 16 (Obama’s announcement was on August 13).Birthers have attempted to discredit the Obama birth announcement claiming, against testimony of the newspaper and the Hawaii Department of Health that such announcements came from the department, that anyone could place such an “ad”....

Americans are used to seeing some products and services getting better and cheaper all the time. But some services don’t, and they’re important ones: health care and education are the best examples. The market for health-care services is a lot like the market for cellular phones: It is driven by technology and innovation and, because the capital costs of building a cellular network or a hospital MRI clinic are substantial, the markets tend to be more efficient when there are larger numbers of participants. If you could take an iPhone back to 1982, it would seem like something out of...

I’m dozing, as I often do on airplanes, but the guy behind me has been broadcasting nonstop for nearly three hours. I finally admit defeat and start some serious eavesdropping. He’s talking about food, damning farming, particularly livestock farming, compensating for his lack of knowledge with volume.I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes frightening...

Several readers have written over the past few days taking us to task for dismissing so-called birthers as lunatics without bothering to refute their claims. We reluctantly concede their point. The birthers have managed to sow confusion in the minds of some who are not lunatics, and for the latter group’s benefit it is worth clarifying matters.

The time for universal health insurance coverage has come. Everybody seems to know that -- except for the Republicans, all too many of whom cling to traditional denunciations of universal coverage as socialism... The Republicans could instead offer a consumer-controlled universal coverage system, like that in Switzerland, in which the people, not the government, control how much they spend on health. There are no government health insurance programs. Instead, the Swiss choose from about 85 private heath insurers... This consumer-driven, universal coverage system provides excellent health care for the sick, tops the world in consumer satisfaction, and costs 40 percent...

Obama’s first 100 days have occasioned a number of dispiriting moments, but yesterday’s attack on Chrysler’s bondholders represented a new low. In a speech announcing the company’s bankruptcy filing, President Obama blasted “a group of investment firms and hedge funds [that] decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.” That is nothing short of a lie. The consortium wasn’t holding out for a bailout. It was holding out for a bankruptcy. The administration tried desperately to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy court; in the process, it demonstrated exactly why that institution is so valuable. Obama’s auto...

Ask most people in America today whether buying a home is better than renting one, and you’ll likely get a response that equates renting with stuffing money down a garbage disposal. The idea of homeownership today is not one that simply evokes the comfort or pride of living in a place of one’s own. Instead, it’s become part of a common investment philosophy. But if you ask Edmund Phelps, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from Columbia University, he’ll proudly declare that he doesn’t own a home. And to him, that’s not a bad thing. “It used to be that the business...

The theory: Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate Doesn’t Really Say He Was Born in Hawaii The facts...

According to the World Nut Daily (motto: “Making The National Enquirer Seem Credible Since 1997″) someone whose fake name and fake doctoral title is “Dr Ron Polarik” is claiming to be an “imaging guru” and has called Obama’s certification of live birth (COLB), “a fake”.

We examine a sample of 459 firms filing for Chapter 11 during the period 1991 to 1998 and find that our sample firms experience significant improvements in their operating performance during Chapter 11. Our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Chapter 11, if anything, provides net benefits to bankrupt firms. In the cross section, firms with higher debt ratios experience greater improvements in operating performance, and the complexity of the renegotiation process negatively affects the improvement. We find no relationship between Chapter 11 outcome and changes in risk-adjusted firm value in Chapter 11.

We calculate the costs and benefits of the largest ever U.S. Government intervention in the financial system. We estimate that the revised Paulson plan increased the value of banks’ financial claims by $109 billion at a taxpayers’ cost of $112 -135 billions, creating no value in the banking sector. We compare the cost of Paulson’s plan with the costs of alternative solutions that would have achieved the same objective in term of solvency of the banking system. We find that the revised Paulson plan is the most expensive for the taxpayers, second only to the original Paulson plan. The biggest...

As Paulson's and the world's confidence in the original rescue plan has waned, Luigi Zingales, a finance professor from the University of Chicago, who early on opposed the Paulson plan, presents Plan B. Plan B is an innovative approach for dealing directly with the foreclosure crises which avoids the costs and moral hazard problems of other proposals, together with a prepackaged bankruptcy/recapitalization proposal inspired by Lucian Bebchuk.