As we embark upon a new year of trying to save this country and restore its founding principles, I have spent much time contemplating questions of readers — most important of which is that given the massive problems we continue to face, and would face even with the most principled conservative Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, what can be done?

But in order to deal with our current struggles, we must recognize that they are symptoms.  The cure to these symptoms lies in dealing with their root causes.  However, even before dealing with our struggles and their root causes, we must ask, what is our vision for America, and what is the role of government in helping to ensure it rather than dooming us to never reach it?

My view of America is a country in which people are free to pursue their greatest good as they see it, or as the founders put it to create a land in which people can pursue their happiness.  This system presupposes that the people are protected.  Before people can partake in mutually beneficial trade and activity, they must be reasonably secure in their persons and their property.  As such, free markets and the free people that create these markets require strong national defense.

So the vision should be clear — government’s role is to lay the foundation for people to be free, furnishing and preserving prosperity by providing defense for it, both against external aggressors and internal ones by providing a set of stable laws protecting private property and contracts specifically and the individual generally.

Where we stand today is that the government, created to ensure these things is instead imperiling them.  Rather than securing private property it consumes and redistributes it.  Further, at every avenue government creates barriers to the free voluntary exchange of goods and services that heretofore have provided such unparalleled levels of comfort for us all.  Rather than defending us from foreign enemies it cuts deals with them, concedes to them and generally submits to them out of political correctness, moral relativism and an inane commitment to multiculturalism.

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In a June 14th editorial entitled “Politicizing the Fed,” the Wall Street Journal sheds light on one of the dubious regulations of the upcoming financial reform bill.  The Journal states:

The biggest underreported threat comes from Subtitle I, Section 1801 of the House financial reform bill titled “Inclusion of Minorities and Women; Diversity in Agency Workforce.” Sponsored by California Democrat Maxine Waters, the provision requires each federal financial agency, the Fed Board of Governors and the 12 regional Fed banks to “establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.”

So what else is new, you say? Don’t the feds already dictate racial and gender hiring? Yes, they do, through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and assorted other federal laws. As a matter of racial and gender diversity, the Waters provision is at best redundant.

But Ms. Waters and the House are hunting bigger game—to wit, the political allocation of credit.

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The House provision makes that very clear by making each diversity officer a Presidential appointee who must be confirmed by the Senate.The post, says the bill, will be “comparable to that of other senior level staff.”  The post, says the bill, will be “comparable to that of other senior level staff.”

The law says this diversity czar will “ensure equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic and gender diversity” of the work force and senior management of these institutions. More ominously, this creature of Congress and the White House will also be charged with “increas[ing] the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts” of each agency and conducting “an assessment” of stated inclusion goals.

Mull over that one for a minute. Having recently lived through a financial mania and panic caused in part by political pressure for “affordable housing,” Congress will now order regulators to allocate credit by race and gender.

In an article I wrote on February 28th entitled “Fiscal Death by Welfare,” I argued: “I believe that as the downturn goes on the government will blame the banks for the lack of economic growth and force them to allocate credit to chosen political entrepreneurs and other bad credit risks…”  I truly wish I had been wrong in my assessment.

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And then, we drove down to DC…

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Read the full transcript and listen to the audio here.

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A famous community organizer once said, “The only way to upset the power structure in your communities is to goad them, confuse them, irritate them and, most of all, make them live by their own rules.  If you make them live by their own rules, you destroy them.” Impossible demands can irritate modern leftists in ways nothing else can, whether it’s by banning Lucky Charms cereal because it’s racist against Irish people, calling Planned Parenthood saying you want to donate money for black abortions in the name of Margaret Sanger, or making Sen. Snowe sign an oversized bailout check for a billion dollars to Amtrak, in her own office.

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The scenario we posed the ACORN Housing employees in Baltimore is due to the application of similar power tactics. We gave ACORN a taste of its own medicine.  ACORN was alleged to be thug-like, criminal, and nefarious.  This criminal behavior was evidenced by a video of Baltimore ACORN community organizers breaking the locks on foreclosed homes.  Instead of railing against their radicalism, it is best to bring out this type of radicalism. Hannah Giles and I took advantage of ACORN’s regard for thug criminality by posing the most ridiculous criminal scenario we could think of and seeing if they would comply–which they did without hesitation.

Additionally, instead of focusing on foreclosure itself, which has become seemingly as politicized as abortion, we focused on crimes more difficult for the left to defend: trafficking of young helpless girls and tax evasion. The first group represents the severely disadvantaged, the second a threat to the distribution of wealth. (more…)