Glenn Reynolds in today’s Washington Examiner:

While Independence Day is about independence from Great Britain, today it’s also associated with more general notions of freedom — individual independence, not just political independence.

Unfortunately, America’s political class doesn’t want you independent. It wants you as dependent as possible. As the Rainmakers sang back in the 1980s, “They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.”

So what can you do? Everybody focuses on the 2012 elections, and those are important. But why wait? Here are three things you can do now.

(more…)

If my experience with one U.S. Department of Justice agency is indicative of how the federal government operates in this new era of transparency, then I must conclude that transparency causes “blindness.”

Several times during the past 18 months, I’ve contacted people at the National Institute of Justice — the research, development and evaluation arm of the DoJ in Washington, D.C. — with seemingly-innocuous questions about a grant the agency awarded to a state mental health agency in Oklahoma almost five years ago. NIJ’s answers would better equip me to explain to my readers how NIJ works. Unfortunately, it seems NIJ officials prefer I remain “blind” to what’s going on inside the agency.

Some background: Curious to learn details about NIJ’s criteria for granting non-competitive awards, I forwarded several questions to Jolene Hernon July 28. After pointing out to my contact in the NIJ Office of Communications that less than one percent of the total amount of NIJ’s annual awards in 2009 was non-competitive, according to the Guidelines Regarding Non-Competitive Awards published on the NIJ web site, I asked several questions as follows:

• I asked Hernon to explain whether or not the guidelines used in granting non-competitive awards have changed since Jan. 1, 2005, and, if they have changed, asked her to explain those changes;

• Prefacing my request with “If the guidelines have not changed,” I asked her to explain the basis upon which a particular non-competitive award was granted; and

• Finally, I asked for a copy of the NIJ director’s “determination in writing,” as called for in the current guidelines, that the award in question was worthy of non-competitive status.

I asked the final question above after reading on the NIJ web site that the agency’s policy is to make non-competitive awards only under the following circumstances:

(more…)

Economist John Tamny has a piece in Forbes, “The Paradox Of A ‘Giving’ Government”, detailing the new, stepped-up emphasis by business on getting cozy with Washington, and how and why it pays off. In it is a very disturbing example of why we should expect at best weak and highly dispiriting pushback from Republicans when Obama finally gets around to following through on his telegraphed Plan B for the “global warming” agenda, “green jobs”.

“Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., presently a darling among Republicans for his pro-growth policies, has long made known his dislike of the 2009 Obama stimulus plan as a ‘wasteful spending spree.’ Nice rhetoric for sure–and as it turns out not very pure. In October 2009 the congressman wrote a letter to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis in favor of a grant application in his district, which, according to Ryan, would ‘place 1,000 workers in green jobs.’”

That’s pretty stomach-turning, when you consider the source. The government can give us nothing that it has not taken from us. The government cannot give your favored constituencies anything it has not taken away from others. The politics of envy have never been as strong in the United States as in Europe – which fact has given us a chance over the decades, but it appears to be a dwindling chance.

And no one who attended any appreciable part of CPAC this past weekend has any time for the philosophy that these are just the accommodations that one must make to stay here and do good work.

(more…)

“Are caged chickens miserable?,” asks three-year study funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture

Party cruise ship receives $123,000 stimulus grant to protect it from terrorist attacks; “We feel that we’re really a low threat for a terrorist incident,” says owner, “but the stimulus was a nice perk.”

U.S. government made more than $98 billion in erroneous payments this year alone

Federal grant intended to prevent tobacco use spent on junkets, tribal elections, and publishing a newspaper

(more…)