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Government dependence is growing
Holder is point man for obstructing Congress
Dan Cathy could have saved his company, Chick-fil-A, a lot of trouble. All he had to do was keep his views about family to himself. Instead, he answered a question honestly. In a recent media interview, the company's president and COO said what he believes and why he believes it. But his politically incorrect views are intolerable, judging from the anger of many on the left, including several big-city officials who are dead-set against his views. In the interview, Cathy said he is "very much supportive of the family, the biblical definition of the family unit." Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel took exception: "What the COO has said as it relates to gay marriage and gay couples is not what I believe. But more importantly, it's not what the people of the city of Chicago believe." Now, spirited debates about controversial topics are an American tradition. But it didn't stop there. The politicians began threatening to block Chick-fil-A's plans to expand in their cities.
Milton Friedman pioneered the path to prosperity
It's been two years since President Obama signed the Wall Street-reform bill that has come to be known as Dodd-Frank. So has it succeeded in creating "safer and more modern rules of the road for the financial industry," as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner claims? Good question. To a large extent, we really can't answer, even though a full 24 months has elapsed since Dodd-Frank became law. Why? Because many of the rules remain unwritten, creating tremendous uncertainty among affected firms and consumers. Dodd-Frank didn't so much create new rules as create the institutions that would set up the rules. And most of those rules don't yet exist. According to Jonathan Macey of Yale Law School, "Dodd-Frank is not directed at people. It is an outline directed at bureaucrats and it instructs them to make still more regulations and to create more bureaucracies." In essence, Congress punted. Lawmakers outsourced their constitutional duties -- and on an important issue that affects millions of people.
Conservatives, beware: You can have reams of information, piles of studies and folders of charts at your fingertips. And you can still lose the debate. That's because you've overlooked a crucial component: the moral case. And that, according to Arthur C. Brooks, can often make or break your argument. Brooks, who started his career as a member of the Barcelona Symphony in Spain, is president of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. In his latest book, "The Road To Freedom: How To Win The Fight For Free Enterprise," Brooks offers a powerful defense of American values, and explains how we can save our country from financial ruin by returning to our free-market roots.
We all know how the Obama administration likes to portray the auto bailout: A generous infusion of money enabled the government to save General Motors and Chrysler. Jobs that would otherwise have disappeared were rescued by this taxpayer-funded largesse. It was expensive, but we had no choice. The reality is far less uplifting: Administration officials could have ensured that the bailout didn't cost you and me a dime. All they had to do was require the United Auto Workers to accept standard bankruptcy concessions. Instead, the UAW got special treatment. Subsidizing the UAW's above-market pay and benefits was expensive. The union workers at GM and Chrysler are among the highest-paid workers in the country. Some $26.5 billion of what the government paid for the bailout went toward making sure that these workers could continue to enjoy compensation that many Americans can only dream about. As labor expert James Sherk puts it, "The auto bailout was actually a UAW bailout." For perspective, $26.5 billion is more than what we spend on foreign aid each year.
Are America's best days behind her? Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, seems to think so. "The American dream is a myth," he writes in a recent column. In a new USA Today/Gallup poll, nearly six in 10 disagreed with the idea that the next generation will live better than their parents do. Negative thoughts like this are nothing new. It stands to reason that tough economic times will breed pessimism. Sometimes, though, we need to remind ourselves of the principles this country was founded on, and reconnect with the genius that created the United States of America, the only country founded not on identity, but on ideas. That's what prompted my friend Brian Tracy to join me in writing a book called *The American Spirit*. As Brian explains in the introduction: "Today, millions of Americans are not clear about why the United States is the greatest country on earth and in all human history." And that's a shame.
"We have tried negotiation with the [Obama] administration and legislation with the Congress -- and we'll keep at it -- but there's still no fix. Time is running out." Running out, that is, for many religious organizations across the country that provide services to people in need. For when Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the words quoted above, he was defending the right of these groups to serve inner-city children, the elderly, deaf, HIV/AIDS patients, developmentally disabled and homeless -- among many others. All together, 55 religious organizations have joined 23 separate lawsuits filed in district courts nationwide. Their common foe? The Obamacare anti-conscience mandate.
Want the United States to gain legal access to the vast amount of oil and natural gas in the underwater Extended Continental Shelf? Get LOST. Specifically, the U.S. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which often goes by the acronym LOST. The Obama administration wants the Senate to act on the treaty, which has been around since 1982. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) recently held a hearing to make the case for LOST.
It has been more than three years since the U.S. Senate last passed a budget. The last time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid fulfilled his legal responsibility, Conan was still on NBC, Tea Parties hadn't come together, and the iPad hadn't yet been introduced.
Who should be in charge of your health care -- you, or the government? That, in a nutshell, is what the debate over Obamacare is about. True health care reform is needed. Unfortunately, the president's signature law is the wrong medicine. Which is why, if the Supreme Court affirms that the law is unconstitutional and overturns it, we shouldn't consider the problem solved. Not at all. We will simply have stopped applying a treatment that was making the problem worse.
What could be more American than encouraging a robust debate on one of the most controversial issues of the day? The answer -- for some on the left, anyway -- is: lie about your opponents and make a pathetic effort to discredit them. That, at least, is what an activist named Peter Gleick decided to do in a backwards attempt to promote his view that global warming is unquestionably and primarily a man-made phenomenon -- one that will cause calamitous changes in the environment.
"Unnecessary, unwarranted and unwise." That's how Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, described it when President Bush announced that the United States would withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The arms-control crowd seemed certain that our "go-it-alone" attitude would only antagonize Russia, China and all of Europe, leaving us without a friend in the world. Today, 10 years after our withdrawal became official, we can see that these dire predictions were wildly overblown. In fact, the ABM Treaty was making the world arguably less safe by enshrining the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD, aptly enough). The idea was that neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union would launch a missile attack if it knew it would suffer a devastating retaliatory strike.
You find them in all walks of life. They might be playing outfield for the Philadelphia Phillies (Shane Victorino). Or hosting the show "Dirty Jobs" for the Discovery Channel (Mike Rowe). Or founding Wal-Mart (Sam Walton). Or even becoming president of the United States (Gerald Ford). The men listed above all have at least one thing in common. All achieved the highest honor possible for a member of the Boy Scouts of America: the rank of Eagle Scout. It's been 100 years since the first one was awarded. Since then, more than two million young men have reached this milestone, including my son-in-law.
We've come a long way from President Theodore Roosevelt's famous saying "Speak softly and carry a big stick." President Barack Obama's policy apparently is to whisper slyly and compromise our security. What else are we to conclude of his notorious open-mic moment with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev? Why would he think it's okay to send a message to President-elect Vladimir Putin that "all these issues, but particularly missile defense ... can be solved" if Putin will "give me space" until after the U.S. presidential election?
"I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared," Thomas Jefferson once wrote. "To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." Fast forward to 2012, and the notion of "perpetual debt" is no longer a condition to be avoided. It's a reality we must confront -- a crisis we must solve. This is especially true because, as Jefferson warned, our very liberty is at stake if we fail to do so.
When it comes to regulations, President Obama's message to his conservative critics seems to be: Message received. Early last year, he vowed to crack down on over-zealous rule-making, noting that the "rules have gotten out of balance" and "have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs." He's right -- they have. But actions speak louder than words, don't they? For regardless of how tough the president may talk on regulation, his administration has enacted far more major regulations -- and significantly more expensive ones -- over the first three years of his presidency than the Bush administration enacted during its first three years.
Into every life, they say, a little rain must fall. And a little snow as well. In fact, here in Washington, some are rooting for snow before spring arrives. "Every night before going to sleep," Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki told reporters recently, "I pray: 'Fall the snow. Blow the cold wind.'" It's not that Fujisaki wants to witness at firsthand the capital city's famously inept response to winter weather -- he's just hoping that the city's cherry trees will wait a few more weeks before blooming.
The archbishop of Philadelphia. The president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The head of the Union for Traditional Judaism. What do these three eminent religious leaders have in common? They're among more than 300 distinguished individuals who have signed a statement by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty protesting the Obama administration's infamous "contraception mandate." Their beliefs fall from one end of the theological spectrum to the other. But all agree that government has no business forcing every health insurance plan to provide "free" abortion-inducing drugs, contraception and sterilization.
