As the campaign cycle progresses we are going to hear a lot about what one candidate or another is going to do about this or that. We will, to the point of weariness, be inundated with campaign promise after campaign promise, albeit, between gratuitous attacks, both political and personal. This is politicking and the American electorate – for better or for worse – has come to accept a certain amount of it from the people in the political class. But expecting grandiose pledges and believing in the unattainable, well, those are two different things. It is the truly foolish who believe half of what a political candidate says he can deliver, and the blame for that foolishness must fall on the shoulders of the individual voter.

While Presidents sign legislation into law, it is Congress – the House and the Senate; the Legislative Branch – that actually crafts and passes legislation. Therefore, any promise made on the campaign trail by a presidential candidate, be it by the incumbent or the challenger (or the field of candidates vying to be the challenger), is subject to the debate and acquiescence of those in the Legislative Branch; in Congress. It is because of this that any promise made by a presidential candidate must be received by the voting public as more of an intention, rather than a promise. To accept a campaign promise as an impending reality is to set oneself up for almost certain disappointment. And to blame a successful candidate for not living up to those campaign promises requires a level of certainty that the promise was actually ignored, not thwarted.

A good example of campaign promises thwarted comes in the form of the Republican TEA Party supported congressional freshman class who, during the 2010 Mid-Term Elections, promised to “repeal or defund Obamacare” and to “bring fiscal responsibility to Washington.” Each of those elected sincerely believed that they would be able to succeed in doing what they promised. In fact, HR2 of the 112th Congress did, in fact, attempt to repeal Obamacare and many of the TEA Party supported members of the House took it straight on the chin during the debt, deficit and budget debates. But for all of their good intentions and actions, the freshmen Republicans of the 112th Congress learned that unless you have a veto-proof majority in the House, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a friendly inhabitant in the White House, absolutes in campaign promises do not exist.

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We were so full of “hope” for “change.” No, I am not talking about the election of Barack Obama, one of the most effective Progressive presidents in American history. I am speaking of the excitement felt within the Conservative, Libertarian and Center Right and Left political communities after the 2010 election delivered the House and a non-filibuster proof Senate to the American people. Finally, most of us thought, some balance in the federal government. Maybe, just maybe, the Progressives and Liberal Democrats in federal government would be forced to the table of true and honest compromise; compromise fitting of a truly free people. But, as we look back over the year, what did we really get for all that so-called “compromise?”

With Republicans in control of the US House of Representatives, the body where – by the mandate of the US Constitution – all legislation relating to revenue is to begin, many on the Right and in the Center believed that the reckless and spendthrift fiscal actions of the 111th Congress would be constrained if not reversed. With a sizable number of new members identifying with the oft demonized TEA Party, there was high hope for a glimmer of fiscal sanity to emerge from the halls of Congress. And while the TEA Party members of Congress are to be congratulated for doing exactly what their constituents sent them to Washington to do, in the end, they were thwarted by establishment, inside the beltway Republicans and the despotic obstructionism foisted upon them by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-NV, (to be fair, Reid was aided by a less than reform-minded Republican leadership in the senate, led by Mitch McConnell, R-KY).

The Budget
In absolute defiance of the fact that it is law that Congress must pass an annual budget for the federal government, Senate Democrats – once again, led by the indignant political disgrace that is Harry Reid – refused to abide by said law in passing, reconciling and advancing to the President an annual budget. It has been over 900 days – almost three years – since the last budget has been presented to the President for his signature or veto.

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Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was sentenced this week to 14 years in prison, but the real sentence is the one taxpayers will serve many years after. He mastered the art of pairing populist rhetoric with expensive new programs directed toward his core constituencies.

To pursue his highly visible programs and agendas, Blagojevich needed money. He found it by diverting billions from the state’s pension system. By taking “holidays” from required pension system contributions and by nearly doubling Illinois’s debt, he burdened future generations to support favored groups in the present.

Perhaps worst of all, as CEO of Illinois, Blagojevich institutionalized a culture of deficit spending. He accomplished this so effectively that Blagojevich’s successor, Gov. Pat Quinn, and today’s lawmakers feel comfortable perpetuating the ruinous habits of spending and borrowing more than the state can afford. Fiscal ineptitude is the new norm.

The Illinois Policy Institute has a new report out that details Blagojevich’s lasting effect on Illinois’ fiscal condition. Read it at www.illinoispolicy.org/blago. Here’s the “top ten” list:

No. 1: Disregarded obligations to state pensioners

Policy: Blagojevich diverted billions of dollars from the pension funds of future government retirees to pay for his own spending priorities.
Problem: Blagojevich ballooned existing spending programs, ignoring his responsibility to ensure the health of the state’s pension systems. Retirees and taxpayers are on the hook for his political expediency.
Program cost: Excess of $3 billion for future taxpayers

No. 2: A culture of deficits

Policy: Grow spending to appease Blagojevich’s core constituencies.
Problem: While Blagojevich was creating and expanding unaffordable programs, the state’s financial position deteriorated year after year.
Program cost: Worst rating of net assets in the nation.

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Yesterday we stumbled across a marketing team promoting GM vehicles at the University of Chicago. Students were being offered $10 to test drive Chevy’s inferior quality cars around campus, and promised an additional $10 to the Colleges Against Cancer fund at the school for each participant.

Passersby were also offered free pizza and soft drinks on GM’s dime.

$20 bucks and pizza, not bad….

While donating money to this presumably noble cause seems like a nice thing for Chevy to do, who decided now is a good time for them to do so? And a $10 giveaway to students? Who decided that was a good idea?

We spoke with one of the marketing team members who said this was a promo that Chevy was just kicking off around the Midwest. He estimated the economically brain-challenged auto company, who received a $49 billion TARP bailout from the taxpayers, would be giving away about $1,200-$1,500 that day.

Sadly, after the smoke-and-mirror reporting over the past year or so, GM has still not repaid its TARP loan, and 33 percent of the company is still owned by the taxpayers.

$1,200-$1,500 to students who hardly pay taxes at all, roaming around a university campus on a Saturday…. All the while, the likelihood that these kids are even in the market to buy a car is slim.

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Yes, THAT Gene Simmons, from The Sun (UK):

This mess is our fault — corporations have no responsibility.

Capitalism is the best thing that ever happened to human beings. The welfare state sounds wonderful but it doesn’t work.

Governments hand out more money than they have to support welfare and they land in debt.

Then they have to borrow money — and then there’s interest on top of that.

That’s bad business. And it has created a culture of entitlement.

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Washington public policy is replete with examples of government regulators thinking they know best, imposing new government rules that then exacerbate the existing problems. As things become worse, they blame the free market and call for more government regulations to fix the burdens they created.  Of course, just as it was the first time, the cure is worse than the disease. And the vicious cycle continues.

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren could be the poster child for the law of unintended consequences.  Warren’s career was built upon advocacy of government regulations that created bigger problems than those she initially addressed.  As the problems compound, so does her call for even more government red tape.

All of this mader her a hero to the progressive community, a Harvard professor, an advisor to the president and a creator of a new regulation-pushing agency of government known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).  Maybe once, she will get something right but don’t hold your breath. The housing market collapse is a case in point.

In 1994, President Clinton and his cronies laid the groundwork for the creation of the Housing Bubble and the Wall Street crisis a decade later.  The Investors Business Daily uncovered a “smoking gun” memo that declared war on a near invisible enemy – racism is mortgage lending:

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On Tuesday, militant, Marxist, anti-war, and gay-rights activists–including some suspected of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations–led the Occupy Chicago protesters into City Hall to stage an “in your face” protest directed at Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

We caught up with one protester, Roger Fraser, a retired Palatine, Illinois school teacher. Fraser is a proud member of the “99%” who earns a modest $7,792.75 a month from his pension.

Fraser is also known as a militant gay rights activist and a member of the Gay Liberation Network–the same organization founded by Chicago G-8 and NATO protest organizer–and militant, anti-war, social-justice radical–Andy Thayer.

You may remember a previous interview from earlier this year, released by Andrew Breitbart, filmed at a Code Pink-led protest against the Koch brothers in Palm Springs, California–where Fraser called for “Revolution now,” and exclaimed, “Just like in Egypt!“

In the following interview, conducted yesterday inside City Hall, we asked Fraser if “this” was the kind of revolution he was talking about. Fraser told us, “This is the beginning.”

When asked what he thought it would take to achieve the activists’ goals, he remarked: “This kind of thing on a massive scale.“ He also answered in the affirmative as to whether or not the revolution would require collapsing the American government, and explained: ”Because….the resistance against this will be overwhelming…very strong….and relentless.”

Cross Posted at: RebelPundit

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It’s just a piece of cotton thread.

And yet, in order to use that simple piece of thread in Arizona for the popular practice of removing unwanted facial hair, the state’s Board of Cosmetology demanded that highly skilled entrepreneurs sit through 600 hours of classroom instruction—with a price tag of up to $10,000.

And here’s the kicker:  not one hour of instruction teaches anything about threading:

Thankfully, five Arizona threading entrepreneurs teamed up with the Institute for Justice and fought back. And this week, they proved that you can stand up to government officials to defend your civil rights—and win.

As Institute for Justice Arizona Chapter Executive Director Tim Keller explains in the video above:

Threading is such a safe and sanitary practice that Arizona’s neighboring states – California, Utah and Nevada – have all exempted braiders from their states cosmetology licensing schemes.   Our goal is to restore the right to earn an honest living to its proper role as a fundamental right in Arizona.

And so last June, the entrepreneurs and IJ filed a lawsuit challenging the Board’s requirement that Arizona threaders first obtain a cosmetology license in order to use a single piece of cotton thread to remove facial hair.  And now those same entrepreneurs have joined the Arizona Attorney General’s Office in asking a Superior Court judge to sign a Consent Judgment that will end the litigation and prevent the Board from requiring threaders to become licensed cosmetologists.

Once the Consent Judgment is signed, every threader in Arizona will be able to work without fear of citations, fines or harassment from the Board.

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Time, experience, and maturity have led me to conclude that it is better to be in control of your own destiny than to have it dictated to you.  If you control your own destiny, then you reap the rewards of your hard work and of your mistakes.

But what if you are afraid to control your own destiny?  What if you have such low self-confidence that you believe it isn’t worth it to even try, that a Steve Jobs is the exception rather than the rule?

The Creation of The Liberal

Think about the people you know who have low self-esteem.  We’ll call that person The Patient. The Patient does not see value in himself.  He does not consider himself worthy of advancement, of self-transcendence, or self-actualization.  Instead, The Patient believes he is a bad person, undeserving of success, love, wealth, or happiness.  He comes to believe, therefore, that any effort he exerts on his own behalf is doomed to fail because he is such a bad person and does not deserve any success.

But there is this tiny little voice — the ego — that just won’t stand for this self-flagellation.  So the ego projects The Patient’s self-hate onto The Other as a defense mechanism.  They project the self-hate onto the person who is happy, wealthy, successful, and loved.  Now, it is The Other who becomes the object of hate.  “Why should he have everything?  What has he done to deserve all this?  I’m not the bad person, he is.”   As a friend’s Facebook quote said just today, “Haters don’t really hate you, they hate themselves because you are a reflection of what they wish to be.” (more…)

Imagine America faces a crisis of malnutrition. Millions of Americans are consuming too many processed foods and too few fresh foods. To stem the crisis, Congress enacts a comprehensive food reform law, requiring food sellers to meet minimum nutritional standards and provide access to healthy foods. The new law makes food more expensive, and many Americans opt out of the food market altogether, choosing to grow their own food instead. The food industry teeters on the verge of collapse. To prevent this collapse, Congress passes another law mandating that individuals buy a minimum amount of healthy food each month. Individuals who fail to buy the minimum amount face a stiff penalty.

Can Congress do this? Does the Constitution give the federal government power to make you buy healthy food? These questions are the heart of the Obamacare lawsuits—merely substitute “health insurance” for “healthy food.” If Obamacare’s health insurance mandate is upheld—as the federal Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in late June—individual liberty is in serious long-term jeopardy.

The rationale behind forcing individuals to buy health insurance versus healthy food is indistinguishable. The Obama Administration contends that, if people aren’t forced to buy health insurance, the market will collapse. Because Obamacare made health insurance more expensive—doing things like forbidding insurers from excluding those with preexisting conditions—many Americans, particularly healthy young people, would have decided to stay out of the health insurance market altogether and “self-insure.” Government must force these people to buy health insurance, the argument goes, to capture their premium dollars and help subsidize older, sicker people, keeping the overall market affordable and viable.

No matter how ardently you believe the health care system is flawed, or how angry you are at insurance companies, you must resist the temptation to let these considerations distract you from the broader and critically important constitutional choice posed by the health reform litigation. At stake are two related constitutional concepts: “federalism” and “limited and enumerated powers.” These concepts aren’t just quaint, outdated relics. They aren’t about “states’ rights.” They are both designed to protect individual liberty by restraining government’s innate tendency toward ever-expanding power.

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Greece, the cradle of democracy, is experiencing chaotic violence at the hands of Socialists and anarchists. That country’s Socialist government has come to a moment in time – like most Socialist and Marxist enterprises – when the system has failed. The promises of the Nanny State and prefectorial centralized government have come up empty and “the people” are angry as a result. Of course, “the people,” the ones who, today, are refusing to realize that you can’t bleed a turnip, are exactly the ones who are to blame for the situation they are in. If the citizenry of the United States of America isn’t careful and willing to make some painful adjustments, economically, we may be starring this future directly in the eye.

Today, We the People – we Americans, stand at a moment in time when a very hard decision needs to be made; honestly, the fate of the nation rides upon it. We can either follow the path of the Socialist Greeks; the path that has led them to national bankruptcy, debt and that nation’s unenviable position as the fuse for a global economic chain reaction, or we can feel a good deal of pain in the form of sacrifice so that our country might continue to exist for future generations.

At this crossroads, We the People find ourselves confronted by some very uncomfortable questions. Are we willing to push ourselves back from the “feed trough” of government dependence? Are we willing to embrace self-imposed personal responsibility, charity and self-reliance? Or are we too uncaring of our nation’s well-being that greed is somehow justified; too narcissistic to abstain from the too easy to attain government entitlement; too self-absorbed and addicted to the “I’ve got mine, to Hell with you” machinations of the Progressive “Me Generation”?

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A century ago, the idea that the Constitution imposes limits on the federal government’s authority and that judges have a duty to enforce those limits would have been seen as a truism, regardless of one’s political affiliation.  Yet today, this cornerstone of constitutionally limited government is under attack not just by those on the left, but by conservatives as well.

Steve Chapman’s piece, “A Conservative Defense of Obamacare,” which endorses former solicitor general Charles Fried’s argument that Obamacare is constitutional, exemplifies this conservative attack on the judiciary’s role in ensuring constitutionally limited government.  At issue is a mandate in the new health care law that every individual either purchase health insurance or pay a fine.  In response to rulings by two federal judges that the mandate is unconstitutional, Fried offers a dismissive response, noting that he knows of no other constitutional scholars who are also members of the right-leaning Federalist Society that agree with the rulings.  Fried also notes that while one of the architects of these challenges, Randy Barnett, was a student of his, Fried only taught Barnett torts, not constitutional law.

But the notion that there are constitutional limits on Congress’s authority to micromanage individual economic decisions – and that judges should be serious about enforcing those limits – cannot be so easily dismissed.  The constitutional challenges to the individual mandate represent a larger intellectual challenge to the sort of legislative and executive overreaching and judicial abdication that have transformed the Constitution from a charter of liberty into a source of virtually limitless government power. This argument presents a fundamental issue of constitutional interpretation that is worthy of earnest discussion and debate among legal scholars of all political persuasions.

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Recently, I got into a big fight with my cube-mate.  After attacking him for his listening to Bill Maher during the workday, he shot back and mocked my Glenn Beck listening.  As if there was some moral equivalence between the two.

“But Beck’s predictions have been right throughout the last two years.  Why would you not at least give him a listen?” I questioned.  My Georgetown-educated cube-mate shot back: “Because most of the people that listen to Glenn Beck are uneducated mid-westerners.”  Infuriated, I protested “Do you have any idea how arrogant and elitist you sound right now?”  Leave aside the irony that I was attacking his condescension while as a colleague of ours pointed out, showing beneath my loafers were our company holiday gift socks dotted with various currencies.

As my cube-mate went on to say, though he conceded that government should not be all-encompassing, “I want smart people to make decisions for people.”  In other words, us silly hicks are incapable of governing ourselves.  This is the fatal conceit of which F.A. Hayek wrote that reflects the attitude of the intellectual class today.  Why is it fatal?

First, the “highly educated intellectual” today routinely receives a subpar education.  Believe me, I went through it at Columbia, one of the few remaining schools with any semblance of a valuable curriculum.  A real education is about teaching the pupil to think critically.  Routinely, education today is more about spending time in science classes listening to professors talk about the merits of joining the Peace Corps (yes, this happened to me), iconoclastic gender, race and political studies courses and cultural Marxist programming of the heirs apparent of the political, economic and cultural hierarchy of the country.

Of those who graduate from these institutions and matriculate to the political realm, the progressive ethic pervades.  And what is this ethic?  The elite must decide for the sheep.

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From The Law, by Frederic Bastiat:

Actually, what is the political struggle that we witness? It is the instinctive struggle of all people toward liberty. And what is this liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties — liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, of labor, of trade? In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism — including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self- defense; of punishing injustice?

It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desire — learned from the teachings of antiquity — that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy.

Philanthropic Tyranny

While society is struggling toward liberty, these famous men who put themselves at its head are filled with the spirit of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They think only of subjecting mankind to the philanthropic tyranny of their own social inventions. Like Rousseau, they desire to force mankind docilely to bear this yoke of the public welfare that they have dreamed up in their own imaginations.

This was especially true in 1789. No sooner was the old regime destroyed than society was subjected to still other artificial arrangements, always starting from the same point: the omnipotence of the law.

Listen to the ideas of a few of the writers and politicians during that period:

SAINT-JUST: “The legislator commands the future. It is for him to will the good of mankind. It is for him to make men what he wills them to be.”

ROBESPIERRE: “The function of government is to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation toward the end for which the commonwealth has come into being.”

BILLAUD-VARENNES: “A people who are to be returned to liberty must be formed anew. A strong force and vigorous action are necessary to destroy old prejudices, to change old customs, to correct depraved affections, to restrict superfluous wants, and to destroy ingrained vices…. Citizens, the inexible austerity of Lycurgus created the firm foundation of the Spartan republic. The weak and trusting character of Solon plunged Athens into slavery. This parallel embraces the whole science of government.”

LE PELLETIER: “Considering the extent of human degradation, I am convinced that it is necessary to effect a total regeneration and, if I may so express myself, of creating a new people.”

The Socialists Want Dictatorship

Again, it is claimed that persons are nothing but raw material. It is not for them to will their own improvement; they are incapable of it. According to Saint- Just, only the legislator is capable of doing this. Persons are merely to be what the legislator wills them to be. According to Robespierre, who copies Rousseau literally, the legislator begins by decreeing the end for which the commonwealth has come into being. Once this is determined, the government has only to direct the physical and moral forces of the nation toward that end. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the nation are to remain completely passive. And according to the teachings of Billaud- Varennes, the people should have no prejudices, no affections, and no desires except those authorized by the legislator. He even goes so far as to say that the inflexible austerity of one man is the foundation of a republic.

In cases where the alleged evil is so great that ordinary governmental procedures cannot cure it, Mably recommends a dictatorship to promote virtue: “Resort,” he says, “to an extraordinary tribunal with considerable powers for a short time. The imagination of the citizens needs to be struck a hard blow.” This doctrine has not been forgotten. Listen to Robespierre:

“The principle of the republican government is virtue, and the means required to establish virtue is terror. In our country we desire to substitute morality for selfishness, honesty for honor, principles for customs, duties for manners, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, contempt of vice for contempt of poverty, pride for insolence, greatness of soul for vanity, love of glory for love of money, good people for good companions, merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for glitter, the charm of happiness for the boredom of pleasure, the greatness of man for the littleness of the great, a generous, strong, happy people for a good-natured, frivolous, degraded people; in short, we desire to substitute all the virtues and miracles of a republic for all the vices and absurdities of a monarchy.”

Dictatorial Arrogance

At what a tremendous height above the rest of mankind does Robespierre here place himself! And note the arrogance with which he speaks. He is not content to pray for a great reawakening of the human spirit. Nor does he expect such a result from a well-ordered government. No, he himself will remake mankind, and by means of terror.

This mass of rotten and contradictory statements is extracted from a discourse by Robespierre in which he aims to explain the principles of morality which ought to guide a revolutionary government. Note that Robespierre’s request for dictatorship is not made merely for the purpose of repelling a foreign invasion or putting down the opposing groups. Rather he wants a dictatorship in order that he may use terror to force upon the country his own principles of morality. He says that this act is only to be a temporary measure preceding a new constitution. But in reality, he desires nothing short of using terror to extinguish from France selfishness, honor, customs, manners, fashion, vanity, love of money, good companionship, intrigue, wit, sensuousness, and poverty. Not until he, Robespierre, shall have accomplished these miracles, as he so rightly calls them, will he permit the law to reign again

From The Law, by Frederic Bastiat:

What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

Each of us has a natural right–from God–to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties?

If every person has the right to defend — even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

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Some people think that marriage is the most absurd institution ever invented by man. But those that think so are ignoring what is truly the most idiotic, paradoxically absurd practice in all of human history: government. Yeah, yeah, necessary evil and all, but still there is nothing that exemplifies human folly better than politics and Washington State has uncorked a doozie for us.

From coast to coast and all over the world liberals are mindlessly going gaga for green. Anything that smacks of greenism is, with religious fervor, promoted and revered. The electric automobile, for instance, is one of the left’s dream modes of transportation. Pursuant to that dreamy green dream, liberals have made sure that all sort of tax breaks are lavished upon those citizens who dutifully jump up to their necks into the unprofitable and technologically untested world of electric cars. Washington State is no exception to this mania.

… and hilarity ensues.

The Associated Press is even a bit snarky about the whole mess.

After years of urging residents to buy fuel-efficient cars and giving them tax breaks to do it, Washington state lawmakers are considering a measure to charge them a $100 annual fee — what would be the nation’s first electric car fee.

Yes, that’s right. After giving them tax breaks to waste their money on electric cars, now Washington State wants to raise new taxes on those very same buyers. If that isn’t a bait and switch, what is?

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In Washington, DC, talking about the Bill of Rights can land you in jail for 90 days.

Our nation’s capital has a licensing scheme in place that makes it illegal for anyone to “guide or escort” anyone else for hire without first getting the government’s permission. To get the license, which the Washington Post editorial board labeled a Tour de farce, eager entrepreneurs must first pay hundreds of dollars in fees, fill out a bunch of forms and pass an arbitrary test.

That is, they need to jump through all sorts of needless hoops before they’re allowed to speak.

[Please help promote this video by voting it up and commenting on reddit here.]

The bottom line is that the Constitution protects your right to communicate for a living, whether you are a journalist, a stand-up comedian, a musician, or a tour guide.  The government cannot be in the business of deciding who may speak and who may not.

That is why two Washington, DC, tour guides—Tonia Edwards and Bill Main, who run a company called Segs in the City—joined forces with the Institute for Justice to file a major federal lawsuit challenging DC’s tour-guide licensing scheme as a violation of their fundamental constitutional rights. Video and photos of the press conference are online.

Nearly every day, Tonia and Bill teach a group of people how to ride Segways and then take them around Washington, DC, on a tour of the city.  Their business is located near the National Archives, so one of the things they tell their customers is where the Bill of Rights is located.  For this, the city government could throw them in prison for three months.

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Putting more and more wolves in charge of guarding the henhouse might characterize the big problems we’ve now created for ourselves.

Government is growing.  The private economy is shrinking. Those wielding political power see fewer and fewer problems they believe private citizens can solve on our own.   Soon, each one of us will have our own personal guardian bureaucrat.

The real difference between us and the hens is that the hens are not paying for the wolves’ salaries and benefits.

This past week new rules governing our credit cards kicked in, following passage of the Credit Card Accountability and Responsibility Act, signed into law last year.

The point of the CARD Act is to protect us consumers from the scheming bankers from whom we get our credit cards.

As result of these new protections, consumers can be grateful that credit card interest rates are the only interest rates that are not now dropping.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the average card interest rate is now 1.6% higher than last year and the gap between credit card rates and the prime lending interest rate is the highest it’s been in 22 years.

More good news for consumers is that there is less credit available.  The average credit limit on new cards being issued is down 11% from last year.

And, because the CARD Act implements new rules limiting the flexibility that banks have, for example, in changing rates on balances of overdue accounts or on exceeding credit limits, banks are simply finding new ways to raise revenue.

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After seeing the U.S. economy start to dive during the summer of 2008, Teresa Pershall decided it was time to downsize her business and prepare for the long, tough economic road ahead. She had, after all, seen this type of thing before. In Vietnam. Decades earlier.

In 1980, Teresa — then known by her Vietnamese name, Thi Nquyen — found herself standing in a rice field holding two little babies and asking herself, “What do I do now?” Her only answer at the time was to work. And work hard. Twenty hours a day was not uncommon.

Only a few years earlier, the Viet Cong had taken over South Vietnam and seized her family’s property. Teresa’s husband and many of her family members were able to flee the country, but she remained behind to take care of her two elderly parents and her two babies by herself. Many others she had known simply disappeared after being taken away by armed men from the new regime. She did not want the same to happen to her children and her parents.

Asked to describe what it was like to live under communism, she said, “It’s a really wonderful life for people who work for the government and a really horrible life for those who work outside the government.”

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