In politics, as in life, there can be an overwhelming temptation to go along to get along; to be a team player; to do the easy thing even when it’s not the right thing.

For far too long, insiders from both parties have played these games. Talk up fiscal responsibility, but spend big. Talk about a federal government that fulfills its basic responsibilities, but then vote to expand it beyond all recognition so that it cannot possibly do so. Talk about doing what’s right, but then do what the establishment wants instead.

Americans deserve better—and they deserve to get to choose something better this year. In 2012, Americans have the opportunity to decisively move away from big government, built up over years and years by both parties in Washington, D.C.

As I said in Sunday’s NBC/Facebook debate, President Obama has thrown gasoline on the fire, but let’s be honest: The bonfire was raging well before Obama ever left Chicago.

Policies and spending served up by Washington, D.C. insiders, in several notable instances designed and written by Wall Street insiders to suit their needs, not ours, caused and then exacerbated this situation. In too many cases, these advocates of big spending and bad policy have used their positions of power to enrich themselves, both while in office and once outside of it. Republicans have been complicit in this scheme, just as Democrats have.

It is time for it to end.

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Last week’s Republican Presidential debate confirmed one thing: Texas Governor Rick Perry’s main challenge in winning the Republican nomination will be his ability to explain his record on illegal immigration as governor vs. what he proposes to do about it as President.

Perry’s opponents have hit him for signing in 2001 the nation’s first law allowing illegal immigrants to get the in-state tuition break that other Texans who attended high school in-state receive.  Four lawmakers out of 181 voted against the bill, as Perry has pointed out, making the bill uncontroversial at the time.  (Note: as a California lawmaker from 2004 to 2010, I consistently voted against expanding benefits to illegal immigrants.)

Today, 12,138 illegal immigrant students pay in-state tuition in Texas, about one percent of all Texas college students.  By comparison, the Department of Homeland Security estimates that 7.0% of Texas residents are in the nation illegally.

Gov. Perry has pointed out more than once, and with a degree of exasperation, that Texas has spent $400 million of its own taxpayers’ money on border security, hiring additional Texas Rangers to better secure the border.  Perry has also defended his insistence that a fence not be built along the entirety of Texas’ 1,969 mile border with Mexico, citing the fact that a river runs along the border through some very remote and rugged terrain that is best secured with “boots on the ground” and “aviation assets.” I have to agree with Perry on this one, building a fence along a river is costly while the river itself will constantly undermine the fence’s footings.  In addition, Gov. Perry’s Texas has passed a law that requires a photo ID to vote (only 13 other states have photo ID laws on the books) and illegal immigrants cannot obtain a driver’s license in Texas (11 states issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, including Sarah Palin’s Alaska).

Dismissing Texas’ own border security efforts, Perry’s opponents have focused on the in-state tuition, calling the law a magnet for illegal immigration.  Theoretically, that’s true.  But does it actually impact an illegal immigrant’s decision about what state they may decide to live in?  I find it hard to believe a 22-year-old man from central Mexico is going to say to himself, “Hey, I’m going to move to California or Texas because, when my two children become college age in 17 years, I can save some tuition money.”  Rather, the decision to break U.S. law more likely comes down to the availability of jobs and the seriousness with which the Federal government secures the border.

To test this proposition, it is instructive to see where illegal immigrants live in the U.S.  According to the Department of Homeland Security, the largest illegal immigrant population by state in 2010 was:

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Those listening to President Obama’s speech in the Rose Garden yesterday may have been hoping for remarks outlining a comprehensive debt reducing package from the nation’s chief executive, but what they got was yet another class warfare screed.  Replete with admonitions that the wealthy need to pay their “fair share” (as defined by Him of course) and sprinkled with his patented scare tactics rooted in the fallacy of the false alternative (either hedge fund managers pay more or seniors will go hungry) the president to me revealed more of himself even than he has in the past about what really makes him tick, both philosophically as psychologically.

He is, at heart, an ardent believer that the wealth of a nation’s citizenry is in the end the property of their government into which the haves pay and bureaucrats then distribute out as social justice in the form or largess to the have-nots.  His increasing vibe of anger, that seems to conversely rise as his poll numbers fall, reveals to me a rather petulant man, unable to grasp the notion that he may not actually be the smartest guy in the room (despite the assurances of his orbiting satellites of sycophants in and out of  the MSM media) and that there are those who disagree with him not because they haven’t heard his message, but rather because they have and have found it wanting.

I found myself listening to his speech and thinking that I’d heard most of it before.  Most but not all.  One new tact that the historian in me found fascinating, and quite cynical, was his reaching down into the soil of Mount Vernon to summon the ghost of our most esteemed first president, George Washington, to help make his case.  Mr. Obama offered up this snippet from Washington’s September 19, 1796 Farwell Address to the nation to bolster his tax raising stance:

“…towards the payment of debts there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes; and no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.”

Here is how Mr. Obama’s speech-writers interpreted our first president’s advice,   Said our current president:

“It’s always more popular to promise the moon and leave the bill for after the next election or the election after that.  That’s been true since our founding.  George Washington grappled with this problem.  He understood that dealing with the debt is — these are his words – ‘always a choice of difficulties.’  But he also knew that public servants weren’t elected to do what was easy; they weren’t elected to do what was politically advantageous.”

I wonder if anyone in the Obama administration studied history because to reach back to Washington to support, in effect, raising already burdensome income taxes to sustain a massive federal bureaucracy and social welfare state is about as far a reach as one can stretch before toppling over into the abyss of utter nonsense.

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Federal authorities entered the warehouse brandishing automatic weapons. Employees were separated and interrogated. The Fed seized over half a million dollars of product.

What was the Obama Administration after? Weapons grade plutonium? Heroin? No…something much more sinister.

Guitar fingerboards.

In apparent effort to lose the musician vote, the Obama Administration has launched not one but TWO Kafkaesque raids on one of America’s iconic brands – Gibson Guitars, makers of such classis insturments as the Les Paul, SG, ES-335 and the brand new Firebird X.

Listen to my exclusive with Gibson CEO Henry E. Juszkiewicz

Here’s Gibson’s official press release…

The Justice department bullies Gibson without filing charges

The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.

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Washington DC,
August 10, 2011

Dear taxpayers, we were slightly off in our projections for economic recovery. You may have heard about this. There have been some externalities that even the smartest economists could not account for. The earthquake in Japan really fouled things up for everyone. However, we’ll keep plodding ahead with same proven fiscal policies. Rest calmly, our trusted accountants are already discovering new and exciting ways to increase “intragovernmental transfers.”

We are trying to boost the economy by telling the consumer — that means you — to spend, and to help you spend we’ll print more money and give it you. By the way, we plan to tax that money and the things you buy — expect increases on those items as well. Yes, unfortunately, it will cost money in order for us to give you “free” money. Don’t worry; governments don’t file for bankruptcy even when we are in fact bankrupt. We’ll print more money to spend ourselves out of this. We own the presses and we can do this. So we are good for it. We only ask that you handle the inflation…because in a way we are bankrupt, but like I said, governments don’t file for bankruptcy. Still with me?

We cannot guarantee currency integrity during this deficit spending while substantially adding to our national debt. We don’t have enough gold for that. Besides, there really isn’t enough wealth in the world to cover all the borrowing that is going on world wide right now. So to help cover some of the revenue, we’ll raise taxes on businesses that we are giving benefits to. You see that is how government revenue works.

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All anybody in Washington can talk about these days is the debt limit or debt ceiling – the total amount of money the federal government is authorized to borrow at any given time. After a decade in which spending increased by more than 60 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars and the debt limit was raised no fewer than 10 times, the government is about to max out its $14.3 trillion credit line, leading to fears that Washington is going to default on its bonds, stop cutting Social Security checks, and destroy the economy more than it already has.

But the current debate over the debt ceiling is full of malarkey for at least three reasons.

1. August 2 is a phony deadline. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has pushed back the drop-dead date when the U.S. finally reaches its limit a bunch of times already: March 31, April 15, May 31 were all cited as deadlines before August 2 was inked in as Armageddon. But this time, he means it, man, really.

2. Reaching the debt ceiling is NOT the same as defaulting on our debt – which would indeed be catastrophic.

Think about it: You can max out your credit cards but as long as you keep paying the minimum amount due each month, your creditors don’t go crazy. Interest on the debt is a small fraction of total outlays and the government has a series of tools – from using cash on hand to selling assets to scrimping on nonessential payments – to make sure interest payments are made and seniors aren’t put on an all cat-food diet.

3. Legislating-by-Panic is no way to run a country. The reason we’re in this mess is because government can’t stop spending. And the government can’t even pass a budget on a year’s notice. But we’re expecting them to come up with a good plan for the country’s borrowing in a couple of weeks? Trying to force through an expansion of the country’s credit line by promising cuts in spending down the road is exactly why we’re in this situation to begin with.

It makes far more sense to do something like sell some TARP assets — the government is sitting on $320 billion in outstanding direct loans and equities investments — to cover interest payments through the end of the fiscal year than to force Congress and the president to come up with a budget that cuts spending — and borrowing — for real, next year, not is some distant future.

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Even if you agree that Congress should have the right to order a citizen to purchase health care insurance on the basis of the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, you need to consider how this will expand the powers of the federal government to mandate other actions that you, your children and future generations may have to comply with.  Consider a party in power that disagrees with your ideology and imposes mandates on you to take actions opposite of your beliefs.  Can you visualize how allowing this mandate to stand is simply an abdication of individual liberty?

As the 4^th District Court of Appeals deliberates the issue as the next step in a journey that both sides agree will end up at the Supreme Court, we are reminded that part of the genius of our Constitution is in how it defined a government of enumerated powers.  Those powers, specifically granted to the government by the people, clearly subjugate the government to the people regardless of the political agenda of those in power at any point in time.  Previous interpretations of the commerce clause, and the general welfare clause, broadened the powers of the federal government but only to increase the reach of its power to tax.  While those interpretations are still discussed in some circles, the mandate for a citizen who chooses not to participate in commerce to purchase a service to benefit commerce is a significant increase in the power of the federal government.  It will reverse the balance of power in favor of the federal government, subjugating the people to the will of the particular party in power at any given time.

This slope is indeed a slippery one.  If a party comes to power and passes legislation to mandate citizens to pursue education and careers based on the overall benefit to the nation’s commerce, rather than individual choice, it will be able to have that legislation upheld based on the precedent this current mandate will establish.  It will be argued that if the nation needs engineers and chemists, citizens should be tested and those with aptitudes in those disciplines should be mandated to direct their lives accordingly.  The argument will be strengthened by suggesting that these citizens are going to pursue careers anyway and the nation’s commerce would be benefited by mandating the direction of their careers.  If citizens fail to comply, the government would impose financial penalties.

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There’s a bad law on the books that is costing lives every single day.

Cancer patients from around the country have teamed up with a world-famous doctor, a non-profit and the Institute for Justice in a major federal lawsuit against the U.S. Attorney General to change that.

This week, we argued before the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.  (You can listen to the audio of the argument here.)

As our client Kumud Majumder wrote this Monday in the USA Today:

My 11-year-old son, Arya, was an angel who transformed my life. His death from leukemia last April took away not just my only child, it also took away my very heart and soul, and triggered the collapse of my 23-year marriage.

Arya’s tragedy happened in part because of a lack of bone marrow donors. Each year, as many as 3,000 people in the U.S. die waiting for a bone marrow donor match. A significantly higher number of people die from complications arising from partially matched donors. This is largely avoidable, and the shortage of donors is made worse by a federal law that I and other families of cancer patients are fighting in federal court.

There is chronic shortage of bone marrow donors in the United States.   The sad reality is that cancer patients die every day as a result.  More people would likely donate their bone marrow if we did one simple thing:  compensate them.

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The chart below (found also here), from Big Government contributor Veronique de Rugy clearly shows that federal employment has grown by 98,000 jobs since the start of the recession. This bears repeating, because lefty columnist Paul Krugman is furiously spinning that the increase in employment is due to Census hiring. Krugman:

But anyone paying attention knew why public employment had risen — and it had nothing to do with Big Government. It was, instead, the fact that the federal government had to hire a lot of temporary workers to carry out the 2010 Census — workers who have almost all left the payroll now that the Census is done.

Um, no.

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Consider the following commentary on the economic situation:

Foolhardy procedures which are divorced from economic realities, or whose economic implications are not understood by their promoters, do not perforce become sanctified and wise merely by designating them as “action”; tilting at windmills does not draw water.

[W]hen a recovery program, which, while it may appear effective, depends for its efficacy upon much the same kind of “cheap money” inflation which . . . was the main cause of the recession from 2007 to 2009, then the present recovery must ultimately prove as illusory as the boom from 2001 to 2007, and it is the duty of economists to pierce the veil of illusion.

Certainly the recovery movement to the date of this writing [December 2010] is a peculiar one: it is shot through with anomalies. With [more than 15 million estimated to be] unemployed . . . with governmental relief rolls still at high levels, . . . there very obviously is something wrong, somewhere.

The fact would seem to be that the authorities who are undertaking the “management” of the current recovery, and congratulating themselves that prosperity is returning because they “planned it so,” are utterly oblivious of the fact that recovery is being engineered largely by the same means which produced the last boom – and recession. With this difference: whereas the banking system during the recent boom was producing an investment credit inflation by extending credit to business men and corporations, Government is now assuming the role of inducing new deposit currency in the banking system and thereby producing a consumption credit inflation. The Federal Government, instead of private corporations, is issuing the bonds which the banks are now purchasing, thereby inflating the deposit currency structure all over again. These “created” funds are in this instance being used principally to finance consumption expenditures through relief disbursements, make-work projects, and the like. . . . [T]he current inflation tends to conceal and to preserve the fundamental disequilibria which so prolonged the recession after 2007 and which we are now carrying over therefrom without having once squarely faced the problem of correcting them.

Notice, however, that the foregoing commentary, except for the terms in bold font, was written not yesterday, but, in its final form, in 1937. The authors, C. A. Phillips, T. F. McManus, and R. W. Nelson, placed this commentary, along with a wealth of related evidence and analysis, in their unjustly neglected book Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1937). The quoted passages, which appear on pp. 212-14, originally read as follows:

Foolhardy procedures which are divorced from economic realities, or whose economic implications are not understood by their promoters, do not perforce become sanctified and wise merely by designating them as “action”; tilting at windmills does not draw water.

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Let’s say you have a knack for cutting hair.  If you live in Florida, guess how many hours of government-mandated instruction you’d be forced to sit through before you can become a barber?

1,200.

That’s right, well over a thousand hours.  Plus, you’d have to pay thousands of dollars to cover the cost of your classes and pass a written exam.  Only then will the government give you a license—that is, permission to cut hair.

Now what happens if you’re already a successful barber but didn’t have a chance to stop working and jump through all the hoops needed to get that license?

Armed government agents could raid your business and handcuff you in front of your clients. Indeed, this is already happening.  Institute for Justice economic-liberty expert Paul Sherman explains:

According to the Orlando Sentinel:

As many as 14 armed Orange County deputies, including narcotics agents, stormed Strictly Skillz barbershop during business hours on a Saturday in August, handcuffing barbers in front of customers during a busy back-to-school weekend.

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A picture’s worth a thousand opinions as Gallup compiles Americans’ view of the federal government thusly:

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The bigger the corporation the easier it is to hide in a cubicle doing absolutely nothing. There are working people, whose entire job requires little more than taking a slip of paper out of one slot and sticking it into the next.  That’s why short quick recessions are good for the economy; when profit margins get narrower than a liberals mind, companies start looking  for useless jobs to cut. Several rounds of lay-offs later, the two slots are merged, and the sheet of paper goes directly from one slot into the next. The most successful companies today have eliminated unnecessary corporate luxuries like the slot guy.

This never happens in the Federal Government, because recessions never mean cutbacks in Federal Land. Since the Government trend is constantly on the growth side, people have been shuffling papers through the slots for years. In fact long chains of cubicles have grown all over Washington DC where dozens of people pass a single sheet of paper from cubicle to cubicle, before it moves into the next office where it goes through another cluster of cubicles.

The best example of this government inefficiency was discovered after the recent egg recall. A salmonella outbreak caused at least 1500 Americans to become sick before half a billion eggs were removed from store shelves. Americans screamed for more Federal oversight of the food industry.

In a surprising September 10^th Wall Stret journal article, we learned there was already plenty Federal oversight; it’s just that Federal oversight is remarkably incompetent. There were USDA workers watching the egg plant seven days a week.

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“The denial of the possibility that there is an endpoint [to the welfare state] is crucial to the liberal enterprise,” says Dr. William Voegeli, author of the new book, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State and a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College’s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World.

In this Reason.tv interview, Voegeli traces recent federal government expansions to President Franklin Roosevelt’s introduction of a “second Bill of Rights” that included the right to housing, education, and medical care.

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You’ve probably heard about eminent domain abuse.  That’s where the government takes your land and hands it over to another private party….one that is more politically connected.

But you may not have heard about civil forfeiture.  And yet, today, it could very well be the most egregious abuse of private property rights in America.

We all know that one of the many beautiful things about the United States is that citizens are innocent until proven guilty.  But civil forfeiture turns that fundamental principle on its head.

This sounds bizarre, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.

Consider the case of Margaret Davis.

As a 77-year-old woman living alone with multiple medical problems, Margaret left her Pennsylvania home unlocked so her neighbors could regularly check on her.  One day while the police were chasing alleged drug dealers through her neighborhood, they all ran through Margaret’s house.  The dealers dropped some of their stash on Margaret’s floor, in plain sight.

Instead of apologizing to Margaret for the traumatic experience, the government seized her house.

Under civil forfeiture laws, Margaret’s property—her house—was guilty until she could prove it innocent to get it back.  And that’s not all.  As it turns out, most state and federal laws allow the government to keep the property they take through civil forfeiture.  So authorities have a big incentive to pursue property over justice.

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Drudge linked to two stories related to the Arizona immigration law recently signed into law.

Headline #1 – Illegals plan to leave AZ over law… Success! People who are here illegally are going to leave in a way that won’t cost the government money in deportation costs. How can anyone argue that people leaving, who have broken the law and are here illegally, is a bad thing. Let them all get in line and come in the legal way like others are expected to. Or are certain classes of people simply not expected to obey immigration laws?

Headline #2 – Bloomberg: ‘We are committing national suicide’…

Bloomberg says:

“This is not good for the country. I don’t agree with it,” he said. “We love immigrants here.”

Mike is half right. We do love immigrants here. Very very much. One way to show respect to those who have respected our laws and traveled here legally, in a documented way, is to be sure and not give a free pass to people who sneak in illegally. If the cost of labor goes up and jobs go to Americans instead of cheap undocumented workers, then that sounds like something the party of labor unions would be for. Or are they for something else entirely?

The sad truth is that so called Progressives are full of crap on this issue.

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Last year’s landmark Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller definitively settled the fact that the Second Amendment secures an individual right—not a collective one—to keep and bear arms. Yet that ruling applied only to the federal government (which oversees Washington, D.C.). Does the Second Amendment apply against state and local governments as well?

Through a series of legal decisions handed down over the past century, the Supreme Court has gradually held that most of the protections in the Bill of Rights apply to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, which declares, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Second Amendment, however, has been glaringly absent from this process, leaving state and local governments free to systematically violate gun rights.

Until now.

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After checking a few federal spending reports, economist Chris Edwards has revealed exactly how much money ACORN received over the past few years from taxpayers.

According to the database, taxpayers supported ACORN to the tune of more than $12.5 million from 2003 to 2007.

Edwards says cutting off ACORN is only the beginning:

ACORN’s share of overall federal subsidies is tiny, but as thousands of similar organizations have become hooked on 1,800 different federal subsidy programs, a powerful lobbying force has been created that propels the $3.6 trillion spending juggernaut. ACORN’s own website touts its lobbying success in helping to pass various big government programs. So cutting off ACORN is a start, but just a small start at the daunting task of cutting back the giant federal spending empire.

And just how are we going to cut back the “spending empire”? For starters, here’s a department-by-department guide to cutting the federal government’s budget.