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.

First the answer: undergo a root canal, win a liver-eating contest and give unsolicited foot massages to at least three Canadian geese.

Now the question: Name three extraordinarily unpleasant things I would rather do than watch tonight’s State of the Union address.

Among my many idiosyncratic habits, I cover my ears and eyes and sometimes hum during long movie trailers, because I favor leaving at least some of the narrative arc a surprise. Otherwise, what’s the point, right? Who wants to spend $50 on movie tickets and a babysitter to see the 27 minutes of a 97-minute film not spoiled or otherwise alluded to by the five minute preview?

Likewise, nearly any sentient American voter can predict the narrative arc of President Obama’s speech:

The American people are great and strong. But they need more federal government to gin up the economy, meddle in foreign countries, fight wars in Islamistan, redistribute wealth, smother successful industries, prop up malinvestments, print money, protect us from guns, borrow money, and invest in roads and bridges and green energy. Teachers work hard let’s give them more money. Something about playing fair and overcoming challenges. We are a strong people. God Bless America.

It wasn’t always like this. Indeed, once upon a Constitution, our Presidents regarded the General Government (as they were keen to call it) as a materially smaller and less necessary excrescence.

On December 8, 1801, President Thomas Jefferson delivered his first State of the Union address. Read the excerpts below, and then try to figure out how the “General Government” went from a model of severely limited, constitutionally decentralized control, to an omnipotent overlord that controls, taxes and regulates every single object, service or person that you can reach with your free hand.

1. Let’s eliminate almost all existing taxes and pay off the national debt.

“Other circumstances, combined with the increase of numbers, have produced an augmentation of revenue arising from consumption in a ratio far beyond that of population alone; and though the changes in foreign relations now taking place so desirably for the whole world may for a season affect this branch of revenue, yet weighing all probabilities of expense as well as of income, there is reasonable ground of confidence that we may now safely dispense with all the internal taxes, comprehending excise, stamps, auctions, licenses, carriages, and refined sugars, to which the postage on news papers may be added to facilitate the progress of information, and that the remaining sources of revenue will be sufficient to provide for the support of Government, to pay the interest of the public debts, and to discharge the principals within shorter periods than the laws or the general expectation had contemplated.”

2. More tax revenue just leads to a military-industrial complex that makes war more likely. Another reason to cut taxes and reduce military spending.

“War, indeed, and untoward events may change this prospect of things and call for expenses which imposts could not meet; but sound principles will not justify our taxing the industry of our fellow citizens to accumulate treasure for wars to happen we know not when, and which might not, perhaps, happen but from the temptations offered by that treasure.”

3. A nod to the Tenth Amendment: If the States aren’t squabbling, the General Government is constitutionally required to leave them and their commerce alone.

“When we consider that this Government is charged with the external and mutual relations only of these States; that the States themselves have principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns, we may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.”

4. The more taxes we give the federal government, the bigger it will get.

“Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burthen which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge, that it never may be seen here that after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, Government shall itself consume the whole residue of what it was instituted to guard.”

5. No need for a standing army during peacetime – that’s what our citizen militia is for.

“For defense against invasion their number is as nothing, nor is it conceived needful or safe that a standing army should be kept up in time of peace for that purpose. Uncertain as we must ever be of the particular point in our circumference where an enemy may choose to invade us, the only force which can be ready at every point and competent to oppose them is the body of the neighboring citizens as formed into a militia. On these, collected from the parts most convenient in numbers proportioned to the invading force, it is best to rely not only to meet the 1st attack, but if it threatens to be permanent to maintain the defense until regulars may be engaged to relieve them. These considerations render it important that we should at every session continue to amend the defects which from time to time shew themselves in the laws for regulating the militia until they are sufficiently perfect. Nor should we now or at any time separate until we say we have done everything for the militia which we could do were an enemy at our door.”

6. Our prosperity is dependent upon free enterprise which should only be assisted within the limits of constitutional powers.

“Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the 4 pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. Protection from casual embarrassments, however, may sometimes be seasonably interposed. If in the course of your observations or inquiries they should appear to need any aid within the limits of our constitutional powers, your sense of their importance is a sufficient assurance they will occupy your attention.”

7. Above all, maintain the constitutional form and equilibrium of General and State Governments.

“The prudence and temperance of your discussions will promote within your own walls that conciliation which so much befriends rational conclusion, and by its example will encourage among our constituents that progress of opinion which is tending to unite them in object and in will. That all should be satisfied with any one order of things is not to be expected; but I indulge the pleasing persuasion that the great body of our citizens will cordially concur in honest and disinterested efforts which have for their object to preserve the General and State Governments in their constitutional form and equilibrium; to maintain peace abroad, and order and obedience to the laws at home; to establish principles and practices of administration favorable to the security of liberty and property, and to reduce expenses to what is necessary for the useful purposes of Government.”