My latest piece featured at the Tenth Amendment Center:

http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2013/05/17/anti-nullifiers-the-grave-diggers-of-liberty/

PS – If you love liberty, ‘like’ the Tenth Amendment Center on Facebook. Our growing number of state legislative successes are proving that TAC is demonstrably more effective at securing individual liberty than any think tank or lobbyist group spinning its wheels to effect change in Washington, DC. States are the bulwark of liberty against centralized tyranny, a fact which many are finally waking up to.

There is something a bit freeing about Tuesday evenings. As a Monday through Friday wage earner, I get this special feeling – picture the old York Peppermint Patty ads – when the week’s involuntary servitude for the Government is over. For two days I’ve toiled to forfeit thick and thin slices of my paycheck to my borough, school district, county, Pennsylvania and the federal government. The next three days my earnings are all mine!

Emancipated from government shackles, I can save, invest or consume freely; well, except for the sales taxes, gasoline taxes and beer taxes I encounter later in the week. But at least I don’t smoke or use toll roads very often. (A bit of an anarchist I am, avoiding both tobacco and turnpike.) For those three days I am free to pursue life, liberty and happiness, just like they say in the Declaration of Independence, living in a land where freedom is more than bald eagles and flags, content that our experiment in limited government is a smashing success, with small exceptions, of course, for mowing the lawn, sorting the recycling into the proper bins and de-pooping the yard.

No doubt critics will regard my Tuesday celebration as premature. If forced to account for the 9% annual inflation let loose by the Federal Reserve’s prodigious money printing, I’d have to postpone my Zen moment until about lunchtime on Wednesday. And I definitely can’t think about the $200 trillion in IOUs piled up through federal deficits and unconscionable shortfalls in Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare. My share of that is ballpark $600,000, or $2.4 million for my household. But since Paul Krugman isn’t concerned about money printing and infinite debt, why should I be? After all, I’m still savoring tonight’s freedom.

Under his watch, the national government grew without regard to constitutional limits, trillions in new unfunded entitlements were added, our national debt rose, the Department of Homeland Security blossomed, Federal Reserve policies continued to create toxic economic bubbles, and trillions were spent on foreign wars that have done little but kill and maim the populations of pre-industrial Asia.

Am I referring to Barack Hussein Obama? Or George W. Bush? Yes and yes.

This week my Facebook newsfeed was clogged with articles and editorials reporting nostalgia for W, inspired, as I understand, by the opening of his presidential library in Dallas, Texas. To prevent from vomiting, I tried to avert my eyes. Mostly.

For some, the naïve bumbling of W’s press conferences and the patriotic nationalism inflamed by the 9-11 terrorist attacks disguised the historic fact that George was just another caretaker of a runaway, post-Constitutional nanny state, and a proud central planner who bailed out investment banks and biggie-sized federal involvement in public schools. Yes, Republican cheerleaders will blanch at this characterization, but that doesn’t change the data. As I’ve written previously, fanatics of team sports share the same DNA as fanatics in political parties.

At this point the reader is itching to find out why I am defending – per my headline – Barack Obama, a politician who proudly wears his contempt for the Constitution and personal liberty on his well-tailored sleeves. On those points, our current president is guilty as charged; his embrace of money-inflation, public debt, government dependency, crony capitalism and foreign wars are impoverishing our freedom and our prosperity. His disrespect for rule of law and the non-aggression principle is as legendary as FDR’s.

But I will defend Obama against charges that he is singularly corrupting the Constitution or that his Keynesian-influenced borrowing and spending policies are starting us down the road to national bankruptcy. Barack has many predecessors to thank for paving his way, including the goofy and now apparently lovable George W. Bush.

My late grandmother always called dog poop ‘dog dirt,’ which to this day makes me picture little heaps of potting soil around the yard rather than the wretchedly stinky deposits that ruin your day if stepped on. That’s the beauty of euphemisms; they don’t always turn poop into gold, but they can magically turn it into dirt.

Euphemism is the lingua franca of politics. Larceny and slavery become ‘taxes.’ The government doesn’t spend your property, it ‘invests’ it. Social welfare programs that ensnare generations in poverty are called ‘anti-poverty programs’.

Even the names of actual legislation are designed to intentionally mislead. The federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is provably false on both premises, making quality care harder to get and massively more expensive. Recall that Americans aren’t booking flights to Canada or the UK for state-of-the-art surgeries and cancer treatments. But if Democrats would have instead titled the bill the “Government Rationing and Expensive Care Act,” I’m not even sure Nancy Pelosi would have voted for it.

A new one that grills me is ‘family-sustaining jobs,’ used by politicians – usually but not exclusively from the Left – to defend the taking of wealth and jobs from certain families and giving to those whose lips are firmly latched on the government teat. It does not take Sherlock Holmes to infer that the users of this euphemism are defending the indefensible.  Two recent examples:

“Should the state divest the system, nearly 5,000 well-trained employees will experience the loss of good, family-sustaining jobs. For a state that ranks 13^th in the nation for highest unemployment, we should be working on creating jobs in Pennsylvania, not cutting the workforce. “  — Pennsylvania State Senator Wayne Fontana, on defending government owned liquor stores. (March 27, 2013, response email to constituent).

“Our region has a longstanding tradition of providing highly qualified and skilled workers to the airline industry. This week brought news of a possible closure to US Airways’ operation center in Moon Township. The operations center alone supports nearly 700 family-sustaining jobs. Few major cities can boast a world-class facility and surrounding infrastructure, a competent and experienced workforce, and growth potential at the airport and region at large.” — Pennsylvania State Senator Matt Smith, on defending use of public funds to incentivize a private business. (March 28, 2013, email newsletter to constituents).

This euphemism is not without its truthiness. If I were to steal your plasma television and give it to my brother for his birthday, my brother would be better off by one plasma television. By the same token, if a government taxes away the wealth of individuals and businesses to provide jobs and incentives to other individuals and businesses, yes, someone will end up with a family-sustaining job. But that’s where the stolen television analogy ends. Rather than end up with jobs equal to those destroyed through taxation (which would just be immoral), the economy nets out less jobs than the ones destroyed by wealth confiscation (which is immoral and stupid). The examples abound: public works expenditures that extended the Great Depression, the Obama stimulus of $800 billion that destroyed wealth and created embarrassingly few new jobs, Japan’s lost decades in which hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit spending did nothing to lift the country out of economic malaise; or Greece, where half the country seemed to “work” for the public sector.  There are no examples where government spending financed from borrowing, taxing or money-printing created more family-sustaining jobs than it destroyed. None. None. None.

If that goofy theory actually worked, Obama, Fidel Castro’s brother and whoever the Prime Minister of Greece is would be presiding over economic miracles where every able-bodied worker had a job, a robust bank balance and a fridge full of the government’s best craft-brewed beer. But invariably those pesky laws of economics have a way of thwarting the government’s best laid plans and revealing that the political class is full of… dirt.

I am not a geneticist, but by all apparent evidence the human species are wired to be partisan. Take the inhabitants of my home city of Pittsburgh, for example. The collective wisdom is that the Steelers, Penguins, and to a lesser extent, the Pirates are an unalloyed good; and that all other teams, notably the Baltimore Ravens and Philadelphia Flyers, are chock-full of sub-human bounders sent to this earth with the singular purpose of annoying Pittsburghers.  A Steeler could – only hypothetically and probably not in the state of Georgia – commit sexual assault, and a Raven could donate his brain for scientific research, yet the Steeler fan would remain unmoved in his allegiance.

These genetic predispositions also figure prominently in politics. The Democratic Party, along with its many scoundrels and profiteers, counts among its numbers those who sincerely believe in economic justice or are strongly anti-war. This partisan attachment seems to absolve its members from knowing that the plain, un-contradicted data show that Keynesian economics and central planning have been an unmitigated failure, impoverishing hundreds of millions throughout modern history. And partisan blinders also seem to shield anti-war types from the fact that nearly ever war in the last 100 years was started (or enthusiastically continued) by Democrats, or that Barack Obama and Eric Holder initially claimed they could use drones to assassinate Americans on American soil.

The Republican Party is also home to scoundrels and profiteers, as well as those who believe in constitutionally limited government and free enterprise, per the original system set up by our Founding Fathers. As typical among partisans, Republican esprit de corps blinds its most ardent supporters from the contradictory fact that government spending continues an upward climb even when Republicans are running things. Much anti-government and anti-Obama rhetoric emanates from the U.S. House of Representatives, which has been fully controlled by Republicans since 2011. With a one vote, Republicans could defund and neuter Obamacare, DHS bullet purchases, the ATF, and all the other various unconstitutional alphabet soup Departments and Commissions that Republicans claim they are against.  But they don’t, and partisan Republican voters don’t seem to notice.

Sports partisanship is harmless fun, unless you happened to be the Santa Claus pelted by snowballs at a Philadelphia Eagles game. Political partisanship, on the other hand, gave us the debt-ridden, security-industrial complex we call home.  Fun for some, I’m sure, but not so harmless.

I’m not saying all the economics teachers in my state should be hanged and quartered, but I would not oppose the administration of firm wedgies on the most of them. But I get ahead of myself.

It has been exactly 80 years since Pennsylvanians first began suffering under a regime of booze Bolshevism, the state governmental monopoly on the wholesale and retail sales of liquor and wine, with limited exceptions made for the latter in the case of the near unpalatable varietals vinted within our borders.

Now the case against socialism is always an easy one to make, which I why I defer to the conscientious Commonwealth Foundation who has continued to make an unimpeachable case against the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board’s Wine & Spirits stores. I will, though, add one vignette, a scene forever scarred onto my brain. The setting was 1970s Bethlehem, Pa. My father’s preference for beer notwithstanding, he took me into what was then called a ‘State Store’, a dingy post-office-looking place with, by all appearances, nothing for sale. We waited in a single file line to see a man in short-sleeves and tie who handed Dad a type-written inventory list. Whatever Dad requested, I don’t remember, but I do recall the short-sleeved man disappearing into the back and after some time returning with a small paper bag, which Dad bought. Later in life when I learned about the misallocation of capital and the perennial shortages of consumer goods under Soviet socialism, I always pictured that scene.

So it is with good news that I can report, especially to my out-of-state readers, that yesterday the Pennsylvania House Liquor Control Committee, after being trapped helplessly in the very public crossfire between free-marketers, social drinkers and the majority of public opinion on the one side, and the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776 and its thuggish President Wendell Young IV on the other, that HLCC finally passed HB 790 out of committee.

Of course this being Pennsylvania, they are botching privatization in signature fashion. Instead of harnessing the refreshing winds of the free market of wine and spirits which delightfully blow from nanny-state New York to Bible-belt Georgia, the proposed law creates an oligopoly that will be dominated by beer distributors and supermarket chains. For those unfamiliar, Pennsylvania law limits the sale of beer by the case to a finite number of ‘beer distributors,’ which, by custom, tend to be located in cinderblock or corrugated metal buildings, presumably because the aesthetic sensibilities of the owners have been made dull through the lack of market competition. In free market states, wine shop licenses are widely and inexpensively available, allowing for neighborhood wine shops that become a proper third place in the communty.

Still, managed competition is better than none at all, and the profit-motive always beats the pension-motive in price, selection and service. Eighty years is indeed a long-time to wait, even for an imperfect, less-than-totally free market solution. That we had to wait that long, I squarely blame Pennsylvania’s economics teachers who’ve had about as much exposure to Austrian wines as they’ve had to Austrian economics.

Cheers.

You can’t kill an economy. They are much too feisty for that. But you can cause them to tap out after a proper submission hold, like a Rear Naked Choke in mixed martial arts. Governments throughout the world have mastered these moves, and I’ve catalogued the most notorious below.

1. The Hoover Hold – When the market crashed in 1929, President Herbert Hoover ignored the wildly successful non-response of President Harding to the Depression of 1920-21, and instituted minimum wage controls and public works projects in a Keynesian attempt to boost aggregate demand. Rather than allowing the market to clear the malinvestments and Fed-inflated currency of the 1920s, Hoover smothered any chance of recovery with aggressive government-corporatist collusion. On a positive note, sales of the hit single “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” likely boosted 1931’s -6.5% GDP (yes, that’s negative 6.5%) from the -8.6% drop recorded the prior year.
2. The Flying Delano Roosevelt – A few species of brain-dead Democrats ironically credit FDR’s tax-and-spend policies for leading the country out of the Great Depression, which is kind of like thanking Marlboro for leaving you with fresher smelling breath. Keynesians like to say the Depression could have been worse; FDR was content with controlling only 1/3 of the US economy. Yes, true that, FDR was shy of the mark set by his Soviet counterpart, Josef Stalin, who had the pleasure of managing near100% of his.
3. The Bernanke Bubble Juggle – Frequent drinkers end their morning shakes with what they call the “hair of the dog,” kind of like fighting fire with fire. Similarly, the Bush-appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke tried to sop up the Housing Bubble caused by artificially low interest rates and government-backed risky investments with – drum roll please – more artificially low interest rates and government bailouts of big financial institutions.  A proper liquidation would have reallocated money into productive lines of consumer or capital goods responding to the Laws of Scarcity and Opportunity Cost, ginning up both GDP and employment numbers. But that would involve admitting that the Federal Reserve has no blanking idea what it’s doing.
4. The Flying Drachma – The Greeks had a good thing going: low tax collection and massive government spending. Everyone had some useless government job and a nice pension to boot. At least until the Germans finally said “Nein!” to Greece’s Olympian national debt that crested 165% above its annual GDP. Now Greeks are lined up at airports trying to emigrate out of their economic Hades of 22% unemployment, riots and food shortages.
5. The Mugabe Guillotine – The president of Zimbabwe should win an achievement award for how rapidly he transformed the breadbasket of Africa into a hyper-inflation hell-hole with legalized pillaging that would make a Visigoth blush. Inflation actually hit 500 billion percent (500,000,000,000%) in 2008. But at least Mugabe rallied export interest in one unusual commodity. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Zimbabwean $100 trillion note is a hot collectors’ item at US $5.
6. The Obamaconda – One of Professor Paul Krugman’s star students, President Obama has been paradoxically dooming his own voter base with spectacular combinations of quantitative easing, public debt, public spending and now a proposed increase in minimum wage. If you think inflationary pressure on fuel and food prices and higher urban youth unemployment are the keys to prosperity for the poor, I’ve got a WPA bridge to sell you.

As long as humans have unmet needs for products and services, an economy will survive. But if your goal is to strangle one into submission, any of the above moves should do you just fine.