Wednesday, June 23, 2010

The Tea Party and the Drug War | Jeffrey A. Miron | Cato Institute: Commentary

The Tea Party and the Drug War | Jeffrey A. Miron | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Drug prohibition, at least when imposed at the federal level, is also hard to reconcile with constitutionally limited government. The Constitution gives the federal government a few expressly enumerated powers, with all others reserved to the states (or to the people) under the Tenth Amendment. None of the enumerated powers authorizes Congress to outlaw specific products, only to regulate interstate commerce. Thus laws regulating interstate trade in drugs might pass constitutional muster, but outright bans cannot. Indeed, when the United States wanted to outlaw alcohol, it amended the Constitution itself to do so. The country has never adopted such a constitutional authorization for drug prohibition."

The Taboo Against Truth - Ralph Raico - Mises Daily

The Taboo Against Truth - Ralph Raico - Mises Daily: "There was, first of all, the policy of terror bombing of the cities of Germany, begun by the British in 1942. The Principal Assistant Secretary of the Air Ministry later boasted of the British initiative in the wholesale massacring of civilians from the air.[18] Altogether, the RAF and US Army Air Corps killed around 600,000 German civilians,[19] whose deaths were aptly characterized by the British military historian and Major-General J.F.C. Fuller as 'appalling slaughterings, which would have disgraced Attila.'[20] A recent British military historian has concluded: 'The cost of the bomber offensive in life, treasure, and moral superiority over the enemy tragically outstripped the results that it achieved.'[21]"

"Today it is fairly well-known that, when the war was over, British and American political and military leaders directed the forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Soviet subjects (and the surrender of some, like the Cossacks, who had never been subjects of the Soviet state). Many were executed, most were channeled into the gulag. Solzhenitsyn had bitter words for the Western leaders who handed over to Stalin the remnants of Vlasov's Russian Army of Liberation"

"The great crime that is today virtually forgotten was the expulsion starting in 1945 of the Germans from their centuries-old homelands in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland, and elsewhere. About 16 million persons were displaced, with about 2 million of them dying in the process.[25] This is a fact, which, as the American legal scholar Alfred de Zayas dryly notes, 'has somehow escaped the attention it deserves.'[26] While those directly guilty were principally the Soviets, Poles, and Czechs (the last led by the celebrated democrat and humanist, Eduard Benes), British and American leaders early on authorized the principle of expulsion of the Germans and thus set the stage for what occurred at the war's end."