Saturday, October 18, 2008

A Gigantic Armed Robbery (Bob Higgs)

More Bob Higgs on the bailouts:

Amid the astonishing details of the Fed's fierce money pumping, the Treasury's partial nationalization of the banking industry, and the madcap exchange of its legal tender for the banks' rotten mortgage-backed securities, we may lose sight of the overall character of these actions: they are, in effect, nothing short of a gigantic armed robbery.

Any armed robbery, of course, has two sides: on one side is the party who takes property by threatening violence against its legitimate possessor, and on the other side is the party who loses property by yielding to this threat. Such "redistribution of wealth" is bad enough on its face, but in the present case its related aspects render it even more obnoxious.

What we have before us now is a systematic redistribution from the prudent and the responsible to the imprudent and the irresponsible.

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