The Foundation

“In the first place, it is to be remembered, that the general government is not to be charged with the whole power of making and administering laws: its jurisdiction is limited to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members of the republic, but which are not to be attained by the separate provisions of any.” –James Madison

Government

“[D]uring the three years of the Obama administration, 106 new major regulations have been imposed at a price tag of more than $46 billion annually – and that’s on top of nearly $11 billion in one-time implementation costs. How does this compare to the number of major regulations that were imposed under President George W. Bush? It’s almost four times higher. And the cost? About five times higher. … In December, the National Federation of Independent Business asked small-business owners to name their single biggest problem. The number-one choice, named by 19 percent of those who responded, was ‘regulations and red tape.’ … And you can be sure that the weight of that burden is being shared. The costs of these regulations are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and limited product choices. Take the price controls that bureaucrats slapped last year on the fees that banks may charge to process debit-card transactions. It prompted banks to cancel many rewards programs and free services. And it has led to higher fees on checking accounts and credit cards. Hardly an area of our lives goes untouched by regulation. The new rules for last year alone covered many activities, including refrigerators, freezers, clothes dryers, air conditioners, and energy standards for fluorescent lights. There were new testing and labeling requirements for toys, limits on automotive emissions of ‘greenhouse gases,’ requirements for posting federal labor rules, and more explicit warnings for cigarette packages. The list goes on.” –Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner

Post your opinion: How can we get Washington to eliminate unnecessary regulatory burdens?

The Gipper

“The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.” –Ronald Reagan

Essential Liberty

“[Friday] was James Madison’s birthday, so today let us then remember his legacy as the father of our Constitution. Madison conceived the basic outline of the Constitution before the Constitutional Convention even met. He came to the Convention steeped in the histories of ancient republics, well-versed in the political theory of the ages, and prepared with a plan for the new government. … After the Constitution was drafted, Madison teamed up with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to write the Federalist, which in Jefferson’s words was ‘the best commentary on the principles of government, which ever was written.’ The key phrases we associate with the Constitution – federalism, checks and balances, and the separation of powers – appear not in the document itself, but in the Federalist. … Once the new Constitution was implemented, Madison served in Congress. As chairman of the House conference committee on the Bill of Rights, he was the principal author. This position enabled him to look after a cause dear to him throughout his political career – religious liberty. … We don’t need a slab of marble to remember James Madison. Instead, we have the Constitution that created the framework for ordered liberty and more than 200 years of stable, peaceful republican government. We have the Bill of Rights that singles out specific individual liberties that all Americans possess, especially the right to religious liberty. And, most importantly, we have his legacy on how to defend this document.” –Heritage Foundation’s Julia Shaw

Political Futures

“Right now, millions of adult Americans cannot legally fly on an airplane or rent a car. They’re not allowed to drive one, either. And if they really need to get somewhere fast, they can’t use Amtrak. When they (somehow) get there, they can’t stay at a hotel. If they don’t have a social security card, they cannot get one without considerable time and effort. In most cases they cannot rent an apartment, take the SAT or enroll in college. They can’t buy cigarettes or alcohol, even though they are of legal age. They might be able to get credit cards, but in many instances they will not be able to use them. And they almost certainly won’t be able to get a bank account or a business license or even cash a check. … And yet the Democratic Party wants to do next to do nothing to fix that. I’m talking, of course, about people without proper identification. … What astounds me is the almost entirely unremarked-upon complacency of liberals who seem to think it’s OK that millions of Americans (by their own reckoning) remain locked out of the modern economy, but who are horrified by the idea that states might actually give these same people new forms of identification – for free. … The crisis is not that these people will be asked to prove who they are when they vote. The crisis is that there are … millions upon millions of Americans who can’t prove who they are at all.” –columnist Jonah Goldberg

Culture

“Last month, at a Raeford, N.C., elementary school, a teacher confiscated the lunch of a 5-year-old girl because it didn’t meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines and therefore was deemed nonnutritious. … But whether her lunch was nutritious or not is not the issue. The issue is governmental usurpation of parental authority. In a number of states, pregnant teenage girls may be given abortions without the notification or the permission of parents. The issue is neither abortion nor whether a pregnant teenager should have an abortion. The issue is this: What gives the government the authority to usurp parental authority? Part of the problem is that people who act as instruments of government do not pay a personal price for usurping parental authority. The reason is Americans, unlike Americans of yesteryear, have become timid and, as such, come to accept all manner of intrusive governmental acts. Can you imagine what a rugged American, such as one portrayed by John Wayne, would have done to a government tyrant who confiscated his daughter’s lunch or facilitated her abortion without his permission? … Americans have become compliant in nation-crippling ways.” –economist Walter E. Williams

Insight

“The goal of the ‘liberals’ – as it emerges from the record of the past decades – was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot – by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli.” –author and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Opinion in Brief

“There is a war against women. … [T]he real war is against women in American public life, in politics and media most obviously, but in other spheres as well. In this war, leaders who are women are publicly demeaned and diminished based on the fact that they are women. … But to see this only through a left-right prism is to miss the problem. The problem is the coarsening of discourse in public life. … Suddenly, by the mid 1990s, there was a new public place of complete freedom. Suddenly everyone – in blog posts, on personal websites, on news sites, in comment threads – had an equal voice and was operating on an equal field. The Internet became … a bit of a Wild West. It was exciting and invigorating, a new frontier, but it held dangers, too, and darkness. When anyone can say anything, anyone will. … The Internet is a breakthrough in human freedom. But over the past 20 years it has had a certain leveling effect. It hypes the cheap and glitzy, it reduces the worthiness of a thought to the number of clicks it gets. It has helped set a new cultural tone.” –columnist Peggy Noonan

Faith & Family

“A new generation of ethicists has begun making the case in favor of so-called ‘after birth abortion.’ Like Princeton’s Peter Singer, they believe that infants are not ‘persons’ entitled to the right to life. Why? Because infants, while human, are not ‘self-aware.’ And these ethicists assert that human beings who lack self-awareness are not ‘persons’ and, if they are not persons, then they have no independent moral status, no automatic right to life, and no claim to the protections of law. The question of whether a newborn child would be allowed to live or die, the ‘ethicists’ argue, would depend solely on the wishes of their parents. The same reasons that might ‘justify’ an abortion at three months gestation would justify an ‘after-birth abortion’ – i.e., the parents can kill a child who is inconvenient, disabled, the ‘wrong’ gender, or simply unwanted. This new thinking shreds the quality-of-life façade that’s often used to justify the abortion of a handicapped child: the only ‘quality of life’ that matters here is that of the parents. … This is our future: an infant’s claim on life will be no greater than that of a pre-born child – non-existent. More precisely, this is our future unless we fight back-loudly.” –columnist Rebecca Hagelin

Reader Comments

“I worked for the Department of Revenue in my state for 15 years, after my retirement from the U.S. Navy. I was firmly convinced the ‘Marketplace Fairness Act’ was needed to level the playing field and to provide more revenue for my state. However, after reconsidering based on the evidence of Alexander’s position, I am now firmly opposed to this legislation. Thanks for the eye opener!”

“I agree with Mark Alexander’s assertion that the so-called ‘Market Place Fairness Act,’ the Republican plan to tax all Internet purchases, amounts to a huge tax increase that will only further fuel our bloated government, and if ‘fairness’ is really the objective the proposal should be revenue neutral. But I don’t understand why he would assert that getting information on a product at a retail store and then going online to buy it is ‘morally wrong.’ I have no obligation to buy the more expensive item from the retailer.”

Editor’s Reply: As a small business owner who has substantial overhead associated with our Patriot Post operations, I believe that shopping for products at a retail store, having an employee of that retailer help you evaluate a product in three dimensions, and then leaving the store and purchasing that product online for a better price – in part because the online seller has much lower overhead than a retail operation – is tantamount to theft. In other words, Best Buy should not be the showroom for Amazon. It may not be legally wrong, but I do believe this is morally wrong, and personally, I make every effort to place moral integrity above what is legally required. Indeed, I do think free enterprise is subject to moral obligations, though I certainly do not support legislating such obligations to the detriment of unbridled commerce.

“I’m glad to see you have finally decided to call Obama what he is: a liar. Anyone who thinks this impostor has the best interests of this country at heart – has been living under a very big rock for the last 3 years.” –Jason

“As a Navy veteran and military historian, I believe the Navy should revert back to the original way of naming ships of the line. As such, battleships would be named for states of the union (USS New Jersey), carriers for American military battles (USS Coral Sea), cruisers for American cities (USS Boise), destroyers named after naval/Marine heroes (USS Fletcher), and submarines named for fish (USS Wahoo). This has been a time honored tradition in the U.S. Navy and should be re-instituted.” –Steve

“In regards to the flying of a U.S. flag with the stars replaced with the visage of Barack Obama, it appears that Florida Democrats are more concerned with political correctness and Obama sycophantism than with federal laws regarding the ‘modification’ of our national flag. And, as usual, when confronted with this, they immediately cry ‘racism,’ the current mantra of the day for Democrats when they encounter disagreement.” –Scott

“Where can I get an Obama Flag? Perhaps The Patriot Post Shop could offer ones pre-soaked in lighter-fluid to suit my needs.” –GMButler

The Last Word

“Nothing but a direct order from the White House could have persuaded Maj. Gen. Mark Gurganus, the senior Marine in Afghanistan, to disarm his men on the battlefield, even for an audience with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta. … He said he wanted the Marines to look just like their Afghan partners. … Marines are never parted from their weapons, whether they’re on their way to the latrine, the mess tent, or to look up the chaplain. … The Taliban position on peace is clear and unchanging; it would behead Americans wherever it found them. So much for diplomacy. Mr. Panetta is back in Washington, the brave experiment with gun control is over and their weapons were returned to the Marines. It’s not yet clear if the bullets were returned, too.” –Washington Times’ editor emeritus Wesley Pruden

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team