Well, I’ve seen it all. I mean the long arms of the nanny state. Yes, they’re always thinking of me – my health, my safety. Could expenses connected with monitoring (monitoring, not governing) my life have driven the Feds into unimaginable depths of debt and many states into the lobby of bankruptcy court? ...

This June, President Obama began celebrating the success of his auto industry bailout. In a speech at an Ohio Chrysler plant, he bragged that he had saved the industry from collapse ...

In all the world’s ancient literature: Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian - only in our bible do we find an anti-tax text. It’s in Samuel I. The Israelites beg the Prophet ...

I grew up in a blue-collar world listening to jokes and snide remarks about government workers. They were uttered frequently by my father, and the fathers of most of my friends, especially during tax season ...

Christmas 2009 to Christmas 2010; a blur of making up lists (and checking them twice, of course) manufacturing toys and packing the old sleigh ...

The governor cried, where'd the money go ...

The other day I was trying to solve America’s problems. It turns out that it’s pretty hard work, and frustrating as well. I spent hours, yet even my best solutions didn’t make everyone happy. My economist friends hated ...

John Potter became U.S. Postmaster General in 2001. His salary has risen 40 percent since 2006 and he received a $135,000 bonus last year. The value of his total compensation and retirement package came to $800,000 in 2008. The deputy postmaster receives $600,026 in total compensation and the chief of human resources receives $482,820. ...

There is no distinctly native American criminal class, Mark Twain observed – except Congress. ...

Freedom is a big word. Our National Fathers, when they wrote our constitution, understood it better than us. Naturally. They lived in an age where it had only been discovered that very morning. A buoyancy was in the air. They realized that this new, fragile concept had to be zealously guarded. ...

What lessons should we have learned from last summer's deadly and destructive hurricanes? The primary lesson is that we shouldn't have much faith in a federal bureaucracy like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). They amply demonstrated their incompetence, but what's our response? We'll give them more money and more authority. That's not smart. ...

Well, yes, certainly no massage parlors. Or hot tubs, of course; one shudders to think what happens in those. And tanning facilities, too, are the Devil's playgrounds. As for racetracks, although state governments promoting their lotteries are America's most energetic advocates of gambling, government should err on the side of caution when protecting whatever this tax provision protects by frowning on racetracks, hot tubs and other things. ...

I don't make a million dollars a year but I think every member of Congress should be paid at least that much. It's not because those turkeys in Washington deserve it. It's because we deserve a lot better people than we have in Congress. ...

The Justice Department's lawsuit against the country's leading tobacco companies accuses them of "racketeering." Yet the government's lawyers are the ones behaving like mobsters. Once you cut through the legalese, the message they're sending is clear: "Nice business you've got here. It would be a shame if something happened to it." ...

Shelley Moore Capito is worried about Hurricane Katrina's fiscal implications. "We don't want to turn rebuilding the Big Easy into the Big Dig," the Republican representative from West Virginia recently told the Los Angeles Times, referring to Boston's notoriously bloated underground highway project. She said the reconstruction effort "is going to require efficiency, which is not something synonymous with the federal government." ...

The aftermath of hurricane Katrina though devastating and tragic has unearthed a more disturbing human concern. The horrific images and stories post Katrina exposes the dirty little secret of government dependency. Disguised as compassion for the downtrodden, decades of government assistance have resulted in the poorest among us lacking basic human survival skills. It appears these people have lost the ability to help themselves. ...

The Washington Post reports that in 1987, President Ronald Reagan vetoed a transportation bill passed by Congress because it had 157 "earmarks"— money set aside for Congress members' pet projects that would ostensibly be considered too wasteful to pass as laws on their own merit. ...

The New York Times welcomed the Supreme Court's recent endorsement of virtually unfettered eminent domain powers as "a setback to the 'property rights' movement." The fact that the Times not only celebrated a defeat for property rights but felt a need to put the phrase in scare quotes speaks volumes about the left-liberal misconceptions that have been brought to the fore by the Court's decision in Kelo v. New London. ...

Americans have always expressed concern about becoming dependent on government. This is partly because they worry that such dependency will erode the spirit of independence and self-improve­ment. This concern explains why there was such broad support in the 1990s for welfare reform designed to reduce dependency. ...

How many times have we heard advertisements from law firms that specialize in elder law urging, "If you anticipate that you may have to enter a nursing home down the road, an elder care attorney may be able to help you create a plan that will both protect much of your assets and make you eligible for government benefits"? Boiled down to basics, the lawyers are suggesting that they can arrange for you to live off others should you ever require long-term care instead of having to spend the assets you've accumulated during your lifetime. ...

President George W. Bush has proposed terminat­ing or strongly reducing the budgets of over 150 inef­ficient or ineffective programs. This is a step in the right direction to pare back the runaway spending that has pushed the budget deficit over $400 billion. In less than three years, the first baby boomers will begin to collect Social Security: Lawmakers must therefore begin to reduce spending now to make room for the massive Social Security and Medicare costs that will follow. ...

In Time magazine this week, conservative pundit and blogger extraordinaire Andrew Sullivan penned an excellent column on the nanny-state policies of President Bush. ...

The federal government is falling ever deeper into the red, but in Washington there seems to be no deficit of wasteful and even fraudulent spending. ...

By the next election, the majority of Americans will be dependent on the federal government for their health care, education, income, or retirement - at the same time the number of taxpayers paying for these benefits is rapidly shrinking. How can any free nation survive when a majority of its citizens, now dependent on government services, no longer have the incentive to restrain the growth of government? ...

Lead paint has not been available in the U.S. since 1978 or used in home interiors since the 1950s. This did not stop Rhode Island from filing a suit on Oct. 12 against former producers of lead paint to recover the costs of providing health care and special education to children thought to be harmed by lead poisoning. ...