Posts in "Big Government"

By Ryan Gilroy at 12:15PM

Oct 12, 2011

Studying Politics

Since I graduated from college in May 2009, I've gained some experience in studying America's unique political system. While I was in college, I was introduced to the American National Elections Studies, or ANES, from Michigan.

I saw this graphic from ANES and imagined this picture has a great thing to tell us:

or even this one:

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By Alec Weisman at 1:31PM

Oct 5, 2011

Brief Thoughts on the OWS Movement

The frustration of the "Occupy Wall Street" (OWS) movement in their call to end corporate corruption and societal inequality is valid. Sadly, several solutions to the problem that have been presented are disastrous because they ask the wrong question. Instead of asking if big businesses and the Federal Reserve have screwed the American people (the answer to which is undoubtably yes, as Glen Greenwald of Salon outlines), they should probe deeper.

A better question to ask would be: How did big businesses, the Federal Reserve, and the federal government cause the financial crisis, and how can it be kept from happening again? Some in the OWS movement will place the blame on capitalism and free enterprise. Yet these activists will miss the mark.

The culprit of this crisis is big government regulations, which no longer act as an impartial referee and permit some big businesses to succeed while others fail. The culprit is a distorted tax code, which enables certain companies to evade taxes. The culprit is departments and agencies that are not transparent and accountable to the people.

These big government policies caused the financial crisis. Tim Carney, the senior political columnist of the Washington Examiner, has written extensively on the mechanisms that big government employs to assist its favored corporations. Solving the mess requires a government restrained and unable to create loopholes. Only then can the government respect the individual, the world's smallest minority, to ensure equal treatment under the law.

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By Ryan Gilroy at 11:27AM

Oct 3, 2011

Spending Money We Don't Have on Things We Don't Need

Forbes has put together a list of the silliest uses of tax dollars by our government:

$930 Million: On unnecessary printing costs
$175 Million: On an unused monkey house (and other structures)
$112 Million: On fraudulent tax reimbursements to prisoners
$47.6 Million: On streetcar system that runs the same rout as the subway system below it
$15.68 Million: On an unprofitable shooting range
$5 Million: On a three week conference for the Federal Aviation Administration
$4.2 Million: "Duplicative Shuttle Services for Federal Employees"
$3 million: Treadmills for shrimp
$2.5 Million: On a U.S. Census commercial that appeared during the Super Bowl
$2 Million: On a study about posting pictures online
$1.5 Million: On new toilets for Denali National Park
$1.5 Million: On a laundry-folding robot
$1 Million: On a study about baby names

Click here for details on each item. It is really amazing what dumb ideas manage to get government funding!

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By Joshua Parrish at 2:42PM

Jul 20, 2011

Who Was Private First Class LaVena Johnson?

Warning: Some graphic images are in this video.

It has been six years since the controversial death of 19 year old Private First Class LaVena Johnson and the mystery of her death still goes unsolved. In the pursit of liberty we often find ourselves fixated on broad issues such as monetary policy, foreign policy, etc. It is important not to lose sight of the individuals who suffer as a result of government injustice.

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By Hans Schulzke at 7:12PM

Jul 16, 2011

Life, Liberty, and Lemonade

"Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their powers; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him." – Thomas Jefferson.

The role of government is to protect our rights.

According to a Midway, Georgia statute, these rights include freedom from unlicensed lemonade: MSNBC reports that Midway police shut down a lemonade stand run by three girls who were trying to save money for a trip to the water-park.

The police were quick to the scene saying “we understand you guys are young, but still, you’re breaking the law, and we can’t let you do it anymore. The law is the law, and we have to be consistent with how we enforce the laws.”

It’s clear to anyone that this is a debacle. This travesty raises three major questions. What is the underlying problem? Whose fault is it? What’s the solution?

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By Shaun Bowen at 9:37AM

Jun 27, 2011

Bad Cases Set Bad Precedents

In my constitutional law class, my professor always had a saying about how the Supreme Court's dicey decisions on issues such as obcsenity, torture, and segregation lead to bad outcomes. That saying was "bad cases lead to bad precedents."

There is no case that represents this saying better than Buck v. Bell. This now infamous case dealt with a Virginia eugenics laws in which the Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision upheld that states could forcibly sterilized "feeble minded" people from "polluting" the gene pool. This case in effect allowed for the states, through state-run eugenics laboratories to deem certain people a danger to the genetic purity of society, then have them sterilized as a matter of public health. In the decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up the decision by stating, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." It was later discovered that Carrie Buck, the defendant, had been raped by her foster' parents nephew. The designation of feeblemindness was given to her to delegitmize her claims.

Fast forward to today and we now have the case of 57-year old Elaine Riddick. At the age of 14, Riddick was raped, which led to her getting pregnant. The state of North Carolina determined that she was "feeble minded," a.k.a. a poor black girl, and on the day of her child's birth forcibly sterilized her.

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By Aaron Rainwater at 9:42AM

May 31, 2011

So it's good to ban charity? Really?

Do you ever spend your evenings aimlessly browsing the internet, clicking on whatever links happen to catch your interest? Sometimes it’s a video of a man, in his finest sweatpants and a t-shirt that’s sleeves have been cut off to reveal his tree trunk-like arms, swinging a sledge hammer at a bowling ball. Other times, you find yourself stumbling upon an article describing particular city government officials attempting to strictly regulate, or even end, some of the most genuinely helpful forms of charity. Tonight, I found both.

Members of the City Council of St. Petersburg, Florida are considering placing a ban on feeding homeless people in city parks. This ban is being championed by Karl Nurse, a councilman who apparently believes the city will benefit by punishing the most generous citizens of St. Petersburg, who dare to take pity on those in need. The proposed plan would make it illegal for any individual or group to feed over 25 people at a time, unless that person or group had first obtained a permit. Even if one did, indeed, meet the set requirements and pay any associated fees necessary for the wise local officials to grant a feeding permit, the permit would only allow feeding to occur twice a year and in specifically designated locations.

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By Tom Baurain at 10:34AM

Mar 29, 2011

Delaware DOT Keeps Kids Safe from Basketball

Sounds a bit like an Onion headline, doesn't it? Every now and again there are instances of an overly intrusive government that defy logic and demand greater context. This video below is an interview with a resident of a Delaware town concerning the removal of basketball hoops in his neighborhood. Why the Delaware Department of Transportation is seizing private property is beyond me. Watch the video embedded below, and read on.

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By Devon Minnema at 12:22PM

Jan 31, 2011

Public Opinion and Self Government

My mother and I were in a discussion the other day on why government workers don’t see any fault in the way they accept subsidies or pay raises without taxpayers’ consent. This is because it is their kickback. Many people fail to realize that almost every person in America is receiving some kind of kickback from a government policy or program, whether that policy be costly or cost-saving for taxpayers. Each issue in public policy is of course going to have at least a few supporters, but what happens when its supporters are exclusively benefitting economically from the existence of the policy?

Let’s take a look at some of the more obvious examples.

The average federal workers’ compensation in the last 10 years has skyrocketed to well over $100,000. Understandably, federal workers would be in favor of these salary rates and ardently against cutting federal salaries. This is an obvious example because federal workers working to lower the average federal worker’s salary would be working to cut their own salary.

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