Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

September 21, 2010

New York City attorney Stuart Meissner was born too late to be an economic commissar in the former Soviet Union or Communist East Germany.

Meissner offers his services to anonymous informants seeking to earn bounties by snitching on their employers to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Under the Banking Reform Act, snitches can be paid up to 30 percent of what the SEC collects in successful fraud actions involving more than $1 million.

As Meissner wrote last July in Forbes magazine, the measure ?in effect ? deputized hundreds of thousands of employees in Wall Street exchange firms, hedge funds, mutual funds, and all other public companies to be the new eyes and ears? of the SEC.

The same government that abetted, subsidized, and indemnified financial fraud now has an army of informants eager to profit by turning against their employers. This kind of thing makes it easier to understand how, in East Germany, most of the population was terrorized into informing on each other.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.