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Cato Dispatch for November 6, 2009

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

House to Vote on Government Overhaul of Health Care

President Obama will meet with members of Congress over the weekend to push his health reform agenda.  The House will hold a floor vote on the bill Saturday.

After examining the bill, Cato Senior Fellow Daniel J. Mitchell concludes that the legislation will cause the federal deficit to soar:

Enacting a $1 trillion entitlement program would greatly increase the burden of government spending. In addition, promises of lower deficits are a triumph of hope over experience. Government forecasters have a very poor track record of predicting costs. More realistic assumptions suggest that health legislation could easily push up 10-year deficits by $600 billion.

In a new Cato study, Cato Adjunct Scholar Aaron Yelowitz explains why young adults will bear a disproportionately large share of the legislation's financial burden. Premiums will increase sharply for young people, but will drop for Americans aged 55-years or older. Americans in their twenties could see a 100 percent increase in premiums, writes Yelowitz.

Remembering the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago, marking the collapse of Soviet communism. The anniversary is an appropriate time for stocktaking and for seeking to answer a number of questions associated with this historic event, its aftermath, and its continued influence.

In The Washington Post, Paul Hollander, author of the Cato Policy Analysis, "Reflections on Communism Twenty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall," examines why there is so little awareness of the horrors wrought by communism.

There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to far fewer deaths).

Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder. People were persecuted not for what they did but for belonging to social categories that made them suspect.

For analysis on why communism fell, see research by Cato scholars Tom Palmer and Swami Aiyar. For a review of Cato's role in subverting socialism around the world, see our Cato 25 Report.

Cato Quick Hits

• Dump the neocons:  "Republicans should take this opportunity to return to their traditional noninterventionist roots and throw their neoconservative wing under the bus," writes Cato President Ed Crane in the Los Angeles Times.


• Three cheers for divided government: "Since the start of the Cold War, we've had only a dozen years of real fiscal restraint." And guess what? All of them occurred when the White House and Congress were held by different parties.


• Video: The authors of two new Ayn Rand biographies discuss their work and research at a Cato Book Forum.


• Podcast: Why Russia must confront the criminal nature of its communist past.

Chris Moody, editor, cmoody@cato.org