— Rights are not automatic claims on goods and services produced by others -- that is just state-sanctioned robbery. If a man is hungry, he doesn't have the right to take a can of soup from his neighbor's pantry. A man's rights imposes only the negative obligation on others to not ...

— Let financial institutions fail, merge or be bought out. The faltering institutions will see their shares devalued and will be likely to be taken over by stronger institutions — as has already started happening.

— The essence of a sound credit market is not lending money as such but lending the real stuff that people require by means of money. Without the real stuff — the preceding savings and subsequent productivity to fund the lending — no lending is possible.

— But central banks and governments cannot transform unprofitable investments into profitable ones. They cannot force institutions to increase lending when they are so exposed.

— Worse, beginning in 1977 and even more in the 1990s and the early part of this century, Congress pushed mortgage lenders and Fannie/Freddie to expand subprime lending. The industry was happy to oblige, given the implicit promise of federal backing, and subprime lending soared.

— In other words, the U.S. Constitution meant that neither the states nor the Federal Government would have power to print paper money.

— In arguing against nationalization, I often point to the United States as an example of prosperity brought about by a private enterprise economy in which, by and large, success and failure are not socialized. But after the takeover of major financial institutions by the U.S.

— Politicians always promise that their programs will create jobs. It's used to justify building palatial sports stadiums for wealthy team owners.

— Not even the worst of his contemporaries could imagine that the premise of government responsibility for infrastructure and education could lead to anything but to the "prosperity and happiness" of the nation. There was nothing in the original Constitution that gave the government the power to "improve" the economy, ...

— We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve.

— In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy. "It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday.

— If the government were required to abide by the same accounting standards as private industry, its debt would be in the trillions, not billions. Last May, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said that the government's unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare alone comes to a staggering $99.2 trillion, ...

— Judy Leonardi, a Stanton Heights resident and retired district home economics teacher, said she objected to the notion that a student could "walk in the door, breathe the air and get 50 percent for that." "I don't think it sets kids up properly for college, for competition in life," ...

— The key to making a housing bubble is to give cities control over development of rural areas — a step that is often called “growth-management planning.” If they have such control, they will restrict such development in the name of stopping “urban sprawl” — an imaginary problem — while their ...

— Barack Obama says, "[Today's economic problems are] a stark reminder of the failures of ... an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary" What?