Government. Spending Quotes

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.

There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.

We need to understand the more government spends, the more freedom is lost...Instead of simply debating spending levels, we ought to be debating whether the departments, agencies, and programs funded by the budget should exist at all.

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.

To the people who are upset about their hard-earned tax money going to things they don’t like: welcome to the f*cking club. Reimburse me for the Iraq war and oil subsidies, and diaphragms are on me!

Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke. They stand four-square for the American home--but not for housing. They are strong for labor--but they are stronger for restricting labor's rights. They favor minimum wage--the smaller the minimum wage the better. They endorse educational opportunity for all--but they won't spend money for teachers or for schools. They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine--for people who can afford them. They consider electrical power a great blessing--but only when the private power companies get their rake-off. They think American standard of living is a fine thing--so long as it doesn't spread to all the people. And they admire of Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.

And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

You cannot take away freedom to protect it, you cannot destroy the free market to save it, and you cannot uphold freedom of speech by silencing those with whom you disagree. To take rights away to defend them or to spend your way out of debt defies common sense.

When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.

The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government.

The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.

As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

One of the most productive ways a government can spend money on the people is by building more prisons. That’s what makes the US so great. That’s what freedom is all about.


Whether voting Republican or Democrat, the result is the same: A corrupt corporate government.

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.

Class warfare or soaking the so-called rich may make for good populist demagoguery and serve the political ends of the governing masterminds, but it does nothing to solve the grave realities of the federal government's insatiable appetite for spending and its inability to reform itself.

The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy are to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security.

..either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.

Behind the facade of elected government are a bunch of corporate controlled gangsters running the country.

Don't bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars

The Italian neofascists were learning from the U.S. reactionaries how to achieve fascism's class goals within the confines of quasi-democratic forms: use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; replace the jackbooted militarists with media-hyped crowd pleasers; convince people that government is the enemy - especially its social service sector - while strengthening the repressive capacities of the state; instigate racist hostility and antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants; preach the mythical virtues of the free market; and pursue tax and spending measures that redistribute income upward.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.

The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in our governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, or that evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.

Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.

The lottery is a tax on poor people and on people who can’t do math. Rich people and smart people would be in the line if the lottery were a real wealth-building tool, but the truth is that the lottery is a rip-off instituted by our government. This is not a moral position; it is a mathematical, statistical fact. Studies show that the zip codes that spend four times what anyone else does on lottery tickets are those in lower-income parts of town. The lottery, or gambling of any kind, offers false hope, not a ticket out.

Corrupt governments are run by corrupt politicians that run corrupt law enforcement agencies.

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

Why can someone get so sick that the only way to get better is to make them more sick? It’s like the world’s longest exorcism. It doesn’t make sense that I can chat with someone live on a tiny screen, that governments spend billions of dollars on war and mayhem, that actors make millions of dollars to just look pretty and skinny, yet no one can fucking fi gure out how to cure cancer without torturing people.

In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles.

Christian patriots spend more time washing feet than waving flags.

If you want to be lied to, all you have to do is believe everything that the government tells you.

Consider these questions: Did Jesus ever suggest by word of example that we should aspire to acquire, let alone take over, the power of Caesar? Did Jesus spend any time and energy trying to improve, let alone dominate, the reigning government of his day? Did he ever word to pass laws against the sinners he hunt out with and ministered to? Did he worry at all about ensuring that his rights and the religious rights of his followers were protected? Does any author in the New Testament remotely hint that engaging in this sort of activity has anything to do with the kingdom of God? The answer to all these questions is, of course, no.

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for. The world is full of so- called economists who in turn are full of schemes for getting something for nothing. They tell us that the government can spend and spend without taxing at all; that it can continue to pile up debt without ever paying it off, because "we owe it to ourselves.

The more government takes in taxes, the less incentive people have to work. What coal miner or assembly-line worker jumps at the offer of overtime when he knows Uncle Sam is going to take sixty percent or more of his extra pay? . . . Any system that penalizes success and accomplishment is wrong. Any system that discourages work, discourages productivity, discourages economic progress, is wrong. If, on the other hand, you reduce tax rates and allow people to spend or save more of what they earn, they’ll be more industrious; they’ll have more incentive to work hard, and money they earn will add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress. The result: more prosperity for all—and more revenue for government.4

As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.

While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I do not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations.

Government scientists are commonly as corrupt as the corporate government that employs them.

be glαd of life, becαuse it gives you the chαnce to love αnd to work αnd to plαy αnd to look up αt the stαrs; to be sαtisfied with your posessions, to despise nothing in the world except fαlsehood αnd meαnness αnd to feαr nothing except cowαrdice; to be governed by your αdmirαtions rαther thαn by your disgusts, to covet nothing thαt is your neighbour's except his kindness of heαrt αnd gentleness of mαnners; to think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends and to spend αs much time αs you cαn with body αnd with spirit.

I’m such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don’t know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too Goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise and their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down! I despise modern music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves – the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck up to it. I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body – I hate my body. The thought of my internal functions, the organs, digestion, the brain, the nervous system, horrify me. Nature is horrible. It’s not cute and loveable. It’s kill or be killed. It’s very dangerous out there. The natural world is filled with scary, murderous creatures and forces. I hate the whole way that nature functions. Sex is especially hateful and horrifying, the male penetrating the female, his dick goes into her hole, she’s impregnated, another being grows inside her, and then she must go through a painful ordeal as the new being pushes out of her, only to repeat the whole process in time. Reproduction – what could be more existentially repulsive? How I hate the courting ritual. I was always repelled by my own sex drive, which in my youth never left me alone. I was constantly driven by frustrated desires to do bizarre and unacceptable things with and to women. My soul was in constant conflict about it. I never was able to resolve it. Old age is the only relief. I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never ever fully succeed in this endeavor. I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It’s all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. Men bully women. The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate. I hate the way humans worship power – one of the most disgusting of all human traits. I hate the human tendency towards revenge and vindictiveness. I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, to cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant. I hate the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people. Sometimes I feel suffocated; I want to flee from it. For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror.

The Bush administration came to office promising to revitalize the Reagan Revolution—which had inspired me to get into politics in the first place. Instead, it took the Republican Party down the path of bigger government, excessive spending, and new entitlement programs that we couldn’t afford.

The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood.

I was right outside the NSA [on 9/11], so I remember the tension on that day. I remember hearing on the radio, 'the plane's hitting,' and I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the FBI at the time, was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it...I take the threat of terrorism seriously, and I think we all do. And I think it's really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort-of scandalize our memories to sort-of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through -- and to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don't need to give up, and that our Constitution says we should not give up.

If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.

It has been my personal experience that the government engages in a wide range of frauds with the common people.

Although changing our society by calling it back to a safer morality is a noble goal, that has never been Christ's goal for His church. The church has but one mission in this world: to lead people destined to spend eternity in hell to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and an eternity in heaven. If people die in a communist government or a democracy, under a tyrant or a benevolent dictator, believing homosexuality is right or wrong, or believing abortion is a woman's fundamental right to choose or simply mass murder, that has no bearing on where they will spend eternity. If they never knew Christ and never embraced Him as their Lord and Savior, they will spend eternity in hell.

My husband claims I have an unhealthy obsession with secondhand bookshops. That I spend too much time daydreaming altogether. But either you intrinsically understand the attraction of searching for hidden treasure amongst rows of dusty shelves or you don't; it's a passion, bordering on a spiritual illness, which cannot be explained to the unaffected. True, they're not for the faint of heart. Wild and chaotic, capricious and frustrating, there are certain physical laws that govern secondhand bookstores and like gravity, they're pretty much nonnegotiable. Paperback editions of D. H. Lawrence must constitute no less than 55 percent of all stock in any shop. Natural law also dictates that the remaining 45 percent consist of at least two shelves worth of literary criticism on Paradise Lost and there should always be an entire room in the basement devoted to military history which, by sheer coincidence, will be haunted by a man in his seventies. (Personal studies prove it's the same man. No matter how quickly you move from one bookshop to the next, he's always there. He's forgotten something about the war that no book can contain, but like a figure in Greek mythology, is doomed to spend his days wandering from basement room to basement room, searching through memoirs of the best/worst days of his life.) Modern booksellers can't really compare with these eccentric charms. They keep regular hours, have central heating, and are staffed by freshly scrubbed young people in black T-shirts. They're devoid of both basement rooms and fallen Greek heroes in smelly tweeds. You'll find no dogs or cats curled up next to ancient space heathers like familiars nor the intoxicating smell of mold and mildew that could emanate equally from the unevenly stacked volumes or from the owner himself. People visit Waterstone's and leave. But secondhand bookshops have pilgrims. The words out of print are a call to arms for those who seek a Holy Grail made of paper and ink.

His theory is that the news media have gone way too far and the trend has to be stopped—almost like he was talking about federal spending. He’s fixed on the subject and doesn’t care how much time it takes; he wants it done. To him, the question is no less than the very integrity of government and basic loyalty. He thinks the press is out to get him and therefore is disloyal; people who talk to the press are even worse—the enemies within, or something like that.

[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer - if the information they base that decision on is wrong. People don't want the truth [when] it is complicated. They don't want to spend years debating an issue. They want it homogenized, sanitized, and above all, simplified into terms they can understand...Governments are often criticized for moving slowly, but that deliberateness, it turns out, is their strength. They take time to think through complex problems before they act. People, however, are different. People react first from the gut and then from the head...give that knee-jerk reflex real power to make its overwhelming will known as a national mandate instantly and you can cause a political riot. Combine these sins - simplification of information and instant, visceral democratic mandates - and you lose the ability to cool down. There is no longer deliberation time between events that may or may not be true and our reaction to them. Policy becomes instinct rather than thought.

These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas. Wait—Texas? Wasn't Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn't its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that 'we have billions in surplus'? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years. And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting—the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending—has been implemented most completely. If the theory can't make it there, it can't make it anywhere.

I do not believe in the government of the lash, if any one of you ever expects to whip your children again, I want you to have a photograph taken of yourself when you are in the act, with your face red with vulgar anger, and the face of the little child, with eyes swimming in tears and the little chin dimpled with fear, like a piece of water struck by a sudden cold wind. Have the picture taken. If that little child should die, I cannot think of a sweeter way to spend an autumn afternoon than to go out to the cemetery, when the maples are clad in tender gold, and little scarlet runners are coming, like poems of regret, from the sad heart of the earth—and sit down upon the grave and look at that photograph, and think of the flesh now dust that you beat. I tell you it is wrong; it is no way to raise children! Make your home happy. Be honest with them. Divide fairly with them in everything.

Why am I spending another minute of my life reading about and yapping about Donald Trump when I know nothing about the 2 million or so federal employees and their possibly lifesaving work that the president is intent on eliminating?

So you think the best way to prepare kids for the real world is to bus them to a government institution where they're forced to spend all day isolated with children of their own age and adults who are paid to be with them, placed in classes that are too big to allow more than a few minutes of personal interaction with the teacher-then spend probably an hour or more everyday waiting in lunch lines, car lines, bathroom lines, recess lines, classroom lines, and are forced to progress at the speed of the slowest child in class?

We like to think that we plan what happens to us, but it is chance, surely, that lies behind so many of the great events of our lives -- the meeting with the person with whom we are destined to spend the rest of our days, the receiving of a piece of advice whic influences our choice of career, the spotting of a particular house for sale; all of these may be put down to pur chance, and yet they govern how our lives work out and how happy--or unhappy--we were going to be.

No amount of government spending can buy quality leadership.

That which we want less of in society should rarely be privatized and that which we want more of often should be.

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income. [In a Fox News interview in May 2004]

But in writing your constitution let me invite attention the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative! Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies . . . no interference however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation. . . no involuntary taxation. Comrades, if you were to spend five years in a study of history while thinking of more and more things that your government should promise never to do and then let your constitution be nothing but those negatives, I would not fear the outcome.

I should have known better than to lie to the government. People always said Uncle Sam would spend a thousand dollars to get you if you stole a three-cent stamp from him. He was more revengeful than God.

Here’s the dirty little secret: Fiat currency is designed to lose value. Its very purpose is to confiscate your wealth and transfer it to the government. Each time the government prints a new dollar and spends it, the government gets the full purchasing power of that dollar.

A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For

The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied...and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.

A false alarm is sounded that government budget deficits will increase consumer prices — with no discussion of how private-sector credit deflates economies. The problem is that credit is debt — and paying debt service to bankers and bondholders (and various grades of loan sharks) leaves less income available to spend on goods and services. So debt deflation is today’s major problem, not inflation.

In some cases, they are already doing so. Influenced by a coalition of community groups, the New York City Council passed a historic budget in the summer of 2014 that created a $1.2 million fund for the growth of worker-owned cooperatives. Richmond, California has hired a cooperative developer and is launching a loan fund; Cleveland, Ohio has been actively involved in starting a network of cooperatives, as we’ll see in the next chapter; and Jackson, Mississippi elected a mayor (Chokwe Lumumba) in 2013 on a platform that included the use of public spending to promote co-ops. On the federal level, progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders are working to get the government more involved in supporting employee ownership.130

How did we forget these lessons from the past? How did we go from knowing that the best athletes in the ancient Greek Olympics must consume a plant-based diet to fearing that vegetarians don’t get enough protein? How did we get to a place where the healers of our society, our doctors, know little, if anything, about nutrition; where our medical institutions denigrate the subject; where using prescription drugs and going to hospitals is the third leading cause of death? How did we get to a place where advocating a plant-based diet can jeopardize a professional career, where scientists spend more time mastering nature than respecting it? How did we get to a place where the companies that profit from our sickness are the ones telling us how to be healthy; where the companies that profit from our food choices are the ones telling us what to eat; where the public’s hard-earned money is being spent by the government to boost the drug industry’s profits; and where there is more distrust than trust of our government’s policies on foods, drugs and health? How did we get to a place where Americans are so confused about what is healthy that they no longer care?

A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid--but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid 'cut' to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!

I see things in windows and I say to myself that I want them. I want them because I want to belong. I want to be liked by more people, I want to be held in higher regard than others. I want to feel valued, so I say to myself to watch certain shows. I watch certain shows on the television so I can participate in dialogues and conversations and debates with people who want the same things I want. I want to dress a certain way so certain groups of people are forced to be attracted to me. I want to do my hair a certain way with certain styling products and particular combs and methods so that I can fit in with the In-Crowd. I want to spend hours upon hours at the gym, stuffing my body with what scientists are calling 'superfoods', so that I can be loved and envied by everyone around me. I want to become an icon on someone's mantle. I want to work meaningless jobs so that I can fill my wallet and parentally-advised bank accounts with monetary potential. I want to believe what's on the news so that I can feel normal along with the rest of forever. I want to listen to the Top Ten on Q102, and roll my windows down so others can hear it and see that I am listening to it, and enjoying it. I want to go to church every Sunday, and pray every other day. I want to believe that what I do is for the promise of a peaceful afterlife. I want rewards for my 'good' deeds. I want acknowledgment and praise. And I want people to know that I put out that fire. I want people to know that I support the war effort. I want people to know that I volunteer to save lives. I want to be seen and heard and pointed at with love. I want to read my name in the history books during a future full of clones exactly like me. The mirror, I've noticed, is almost always positioned above the sink. Though the sink offers more depth than a mirror, and mirror is only able to reflect, the sink is held in lower regard. Lower still is the toilet, and thought it offers even more depth than the sink, we piss and shit in it. I want these kind of architectural details to be paralleled in my every day life. I want to care more about my reflection, and less about my cleanliness. I want to be seen as someone who lives externally, and never internally, unless I am able to lock the door behind me. I want these things, because if I didn't, I would be dead in the mirrors of those around me. I would be nothing. I would be an example. Sunken, and easily washed away.

I think that any artistic decision that is based on whether or not you are going to make money it is not really an artistic decision. It is a business decision. And there are a lot of things that I can do to earn a living and a lot of things that I have already done to earn a living which produce the amount of capital needed to do this project. I came here to spend money on an English orchestra and record my music, so I can take it home and I can listen to it. And... if somebody else likes that kind of stuff, I will make it available on a record so that they can hear it. That is my part of the public service of spending the money to make this event happen. No foundation grant, no government assistance, no corporation, no comittee. Just a crazy guy who spent the money to hire English musicians to do a concert at the Barbican and make an album for Barking Pumpkin Records.

I sincerely hope that President Barack Obama’s government will be remembered as the peak of deregulated corporate corruption and not the ongoing rise of it.

Canada’s political parties spend a few years in opposition and then govern as if it’s permanent payback time.

The United States of America has had the world’s largest economy for most of our history, with enough money to feed and educate all our children, build world-leading infrastructure, and generally ensure a high standard of living for everyone. But we don’t. When it comes to per capita government spending, the United States is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries, below Latvia and Estonia. Our roads, bridges, and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

When one has governed men for a long time, when one has thought that one has acted for the best, when one knows the pains the task has entailed, and then suddenly sees that one has never been either loved or understood, but merely submitted to, then one is overwhelmed with bitterness, and wonders whether one could not have found some better way of spending one’s life.

Israel remains in a perpetual state of war with no plan to resolve its crisis “Americans will not want their government to spend tax dollars or their president’s clout on helping Israel.

..each ministry has an allocation of money to spend on projects agreed to by the government. Every Secretary of State is acutely aware that his tenure of office maybe very short, so he picks out a major contract for himself from the many available. It's the one way to ensure a pension for life if the government is changed overnight or the minister simply loses his job.

[The wives of powerful noblemen] must be highly knowledgeable about government, and wise – in fact, far wiser than most other such women in power. The knowledge of a baroness must be so comprehensive that she can understand everything. Of her a philosopher might have said: "No one is wise who does not know some part of everything." Moreover, she must have the courage of a man. This means that she should not be brought up overmuch among women nor should she be indulged in extensive and feminine pampering. Why do I say that? If barons wish to be honoured as they deserve, they spend very little time in their manors and on their own lands. Going to war, attending their prince's court, and traveling are the three primary duties of such a lord. So the lady, his companion, must represent him at home during his absences. Although her husband is served by bailiffs, provosts, rent collectors, and land governors, she must govern them all. To do this according to her right she must conduct herself with such wisdom that she will be both feared and loved. As we have said before, the best possible fear comes from love. When wronged, her men must be able to turn to her for refuge. She must be so skilled and flexible that in each case she can respond suitably. Therefore, she must be knowledgeable in the mores of her locality and instructed in its usages, rights, and customs. She must be a good speaker, proud when pride is needed; circumspect with the scornful, surly, or rebellious; and charitably gentle and humble toward her good, obedient subjects. With the counsellors of her lord and with the advice of elder wise men, she ought to work directly with her people. No one should ever be able to say of her that she acts merely to have her own way. Again, she should have a man's heart. She must know the laws of arms and all things pertaining to warfare, ever prepared to command her men if there is need of it. She has to know both assault and defence tactics to insure that her fortresses are well defended, if she has any expectation of attack or believes she must initiate military action. Testing her men, she will discover their qualities of courage and determination before overly trusting them. She must know the number and strength of her men to gauge accurately her resources, so that she never will have to trust vain or feeble promises. Calculating what force she is capable of providing before her lord arrives with reinforcements, she also must know the financial resources she could call upon to sustain military action. She should avoid oppressing her men, since this is the surest way to incur their hatred. She can best cultivate their loyalty by speaking boldly and consistently to them, according to her council, not giving one reason today and another tomorrow. Speaking words of good courage to her men-at-arms as well as to her other retainers, she will urge them to loyalty and their best efforts.

But in 1921, just as the government had once adopted a ration system to pay the Osage for seized land - just as it always seemed to turn its gospel of enlightenment into a hammer of coercion - Congress implemented even more draconian legislation controlling how the Osage could spend their money.

Actually, in its essence, democracy is a totalitarian ideology, though not as extreme as Nazism, fascism or communism. In principle, no freedom is safe in a democracy, every aspect of the individual's life is potentially subject to government control. At the end of the day, the minority is completely at the mercy of the whims of the majority. Even if a democracy has a constitution limiting the powers of the government, this constitution too can be amended by the majority. The only fundamental right you have in a democracy, besides running for office, is the right to vote for a political party. With that solitary vote you hand over your independence and your freedom to the will of the majority.

With so many thinkers “spending so much energy fighting over words and ink, we have forgotten to criticize government authority; we have forgotten to pay attention to social welfare. That should worry us.

lot of that money went to big grain producers. The same Republican senators from farm states who said they abhorred government spending of almost any sort became radical socialists when the conversation turned to handouts to big grain producers. “The money follows the political power of the constituencies,

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life — the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools — even universities — are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the United States would have to spend $3.6 trillion more than currently budgeted just to bring our infrastructure up to acceptable levels by 2020.95 China and India are spending almost 10 percent of GDP on infrastructure; Europe, around 5 percent.96 Even Mexico spends just over 3 percent.97 The United States has not broken 3 percent once since the mid-1970s.98

Women, for their part, are always complaining that we raise them only to be vain and coquettish, that we keep them amused with trifles so that we may more easily remain their masters; they blame us for the faults we attribute to them. What stupidity! And since when is it men who concern themselves with the education of girls? Who is preventing the mothers from raising them as they please? There are no schools for girls—what a tragedy! Would God, there were none for boys! They would be raised more sensibly and more straightforwardly. Is anyone forcing your daughters to waste their time on foolish trifles? Are they forced against their will to spend half their lives on their appearance, following your example? Are you prevented from instructing them, or having them instructed according to your wishes? Is it our fault if they please us when they are beautiful, if their airs and graces seduce us, if the art they learn from you attracts and flatters us, if we like to see them tastefully attired, if we let them display at leisure the weapons with which they subjugate us? Well then, decide to raise them like men; the men will gladly agree; the more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters.

I'll govern for the good of the governed. I'll make sure every citizen is properly educated and doctored. I'll cease wasteful spending and ease the burden on the poor through redistribution of land and goods and taxation.

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked on CNN if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. Well, the station was flooded with emails, and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad, because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which (a) proves my point, and (b) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him. Now, before I go about demonstration how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness that's dragging us down, let me just say that ignorance has life-and-death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, seventy percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six years later, thirty-four percent still do. Or look at the health-care debate: At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross-country to protest highways. This country is like a college chick after two Long Island iced teas: We can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget the town halls, and replace them with study halls. Listen to some of these stats: A majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. Twenty-four percent could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket. Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators, and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only three got their wife's name right on the first try. People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes more twenty-four percent of our budget. It's actually less than one percent. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen ad a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence, because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge." Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll say eighteen percent of us think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. And I haven't even brought up religion. But here's one fun fact I'll leave you with: Did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which came first. I rest my case.

There are three ways in which a government can fund deficit spending: currency inflation (printing new currency), borrowing from the public, and taxation. Governments tend to favor currency by fiat (i.e., creating new currency), which allows it to blame the inevitable price increases on speculators rather than on its true culprit, currency inflation.

If Capitalism has a definition it includes, surely, the concept value for money. You do not spend any more than your have to; you go where labour is cheapest, resources most bountiful, rules most lax, governments most permissive. Yet you also pay an idiot a fortune for doing nothing, and it is hard to see why. And if he is a hereditary idiot, very hard to see why.

Thus in South Africa it is very expensive to be poor. It is the poor people who stay furthest from town and therefore have to spend more money on transport to come and work for white people; it is the poor people who use uneconomic and inconvenient fuel like paraffin and coal because of the refusal of the white man to install electricity in black areas; it is the poor people who are governed by many ill-defined restrictive laws and therefore have to spend money on fines for 'technical' offences; it is the poor people who have no hospitals and are therefore exposed to exorbitant charges by private doctors; it is the poor people who use untarred roads, have to walk long distances, and therefore experience the greatest wear and tear on commodities like shoes; it is the poor people who have to pay for their children's books while whites get them free.

Their little life is entirely controlled by the organization of the world. They think as the world thinks. They take their opinions ready-made from their favorite newspaper. Their very appearance is controlled by the world and its changing fashions. They all conform; it must be done; they dare not disobey; they are afraid of the consequences. That is tyranny, this is absolute control—clothing, hair style, everything, absolutely controlled. The mind of the world! ... Most lives are being controlled by it and governed by it, all their opinions, their language, the way they spend their money, what they desire, where they go, where they spend their holidays; it is all controlled, governed completely ... by this world, the mind of the world, the age of propaganda, the age of advertising, the mass mind, the mass man, the mass individual, without knowing it. Is it not tragic? But that is man in sin ... he is controlled by the mind of the world.

Finally, we spend lots of money. Spending on jails and prisons by state and federal governments has risen from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today. Private prison builders and prison service companies have spent millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences, and keep more people locked up so that they can earn more profits. Private profit has corrupted incentives to improve public safety, reduce the costs of mass incarceration, and most significantly, promote rehabilitation of the incarcerated.

The 2000 election of George W. Bush as president gave Republicans what the Democrats have now, total control of the legislative and executive branches of government. When Bush came to office, federal spending was $1.788 trillion. When he left office, federal spending was $2.982 trillion.

Any do-gooder can save one life or a dozen by spending x dollars, but that doesn't demonstrate anything unless you've got x dollars multiplied by the total number of lives that need saving. Stopping poverty one victim at a time is like mowing a lawn one blade at a time. The problem grows faster than the cure can be applied, the only people who profit are the agencies who claim to be cutting grass while they're actually applying fertilizer.

A’ight, so what do you think it means?” “You don’t know?” I ask. “I know. I wanna hear what YOU think.” Here he goes. Picking my brain. “Khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later,” I say. “I think it’s about more than youth though. I think it’s about us, period.” “Us who?” he asks. “Black people, minorities, poor people. Everybody at the bottom in society.” “The oppressed,” says Daddy. “Yeah. We’re the ones who get the short end of the stick, but we’re the ones they fear the most. That’s why the government targeted the Black Panthers, right? Because they were scared of the Panthers?” “Uh-huh,” Daddy says. “The Panthers educated and empowered the people. That tactic of empowering the oppressed goes even further back than the Panthers though. Name one.” Is he serious? He always makes me think. This one takes me a second. “The slave rebellion of 1831,” I say. “Nat Turner empowered and educated other slaves, and it led to one of the biggest slave revolts in history.” “A’ight, a’ight. You on it.” He gives me dap. “So, what’s the hate they’re giving the ‘little infants’ in today’s society?” “Racism?” “You gotta get a li’l more detailed than that. Think ’bout Khalil and his whole situation. Before he died.” “He was a drug dealer.” It hurts to say that. “And possibly a gang member.” “Why was he a drug dealer? Why are so many people in our neighborhood drug dealers?” I remember what Khalil said—he got tired of choosing between lights and food. “They need money,” I say. “And they don’t have a lot of other ways to get it.” “Right. Lack of opportunities,” Daddy says. “Corporate America don’t bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain’t quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don’t prepare us well enough. That’s why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don’t get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It’s easier to find some crack than it is to find a good school around here. “Now, think ’bout this,” he says. “How did the drugs even get in our neighborhood? This is a multibillion-dollar industry we talking ’bout, baby. That shit is flown into our communities, but I don’t know anybody with a private jet. Do you?” “No.” “Exactly. Drugs come from somewhere, and they’re destroying our community,” he says. “You got folks like Brenda, who think they need them to survive, and then you got the Khalils, who think they need to sell them to survive. The Brendas can’t get jobs unless they’re clean, and they can’t pay for rehab unless they got jobs. When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. That’s the hate they’re giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That’s Thug Life.

Are you for peace? The great test of your devotion to peace is not how many words you utter on its behalf. It’s not even how you propose to deal with people of other countries, though that certainly tells us something. To fully measure your “peacefulness” requires that we examine how you propose to treat people in your own backyard. Do you demand more of what doesn’t belong to you? Do you endorse the use of force to punish people for victimless “crimes”? Do you support politicians who promise to seize the earnings of others to pay for your bailout, your subsidy, your student loan, your child’s education or whatever pet cause or project you think is more important than what your fellow citizens might personally prefer to spend their own money on? Do you believe theft is OK if it’s for a good cause or endorsed by a majority? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then have the courage to admit that peace is not your priority. How can I trust your foreign policy if your domestic policy requires so much to be done at gunpoint?

Women have been so thoroughly oppressed that they have accepted unconsciously the role that the ruling sex, man, gave to them. They have even believed in male propaganda, which is very much the same as the propaganda in other wars, wars against colonial people, etc. Women have been considered to be naive: Freud said that they were narcissistic, unrealistic, cowardly, inferior to man anatomically, intellectually, morally. The fact is that women are less narcissistic than men, for the simple reason that there is almost nothing that man does which has not some purpose of making an impression. Women do many, many things without this motive and in fact what you might call women's vanity is only the necessity to please the victors. As far as the lack of realism in women is concerned, what should we say about male realism in an epoch in which all western governments, consisting of men, are spending their money building atomic bombs, instead of taking care of threatening famine, instead of avoiding the catastrophes which threaten the whole world...

On these issues, the public fib. They say they want increased spending, and in theory they do—but in practice they think someone else should pay for it. However, there it is. As I used to say, the public aren’t always logical, but that’s their prerogative. They do expect their government to be, nonetheless.

Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform the most natural and essential official duty—so familiar to everyone in the government service, though incomprehensible to outsiders—that duty, but for which one could hardly be in government service, of reminding the ministry of his existence—and having, for the due performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably spending his days at the races and in the summer villas.

Stephan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform the most natural and essential official duty — so familiar to everyone in the government service, though incomprehensible to outsiders — that duty, but for which one could hardly be in government service, of reminding the ministry of his existence — and having, for the due performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably spending his days at the races and in the summer villas.

As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live, including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are. Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.

Development is not primarily a matter of mechanically collecting taxes to fund spending, no matter how useful this spending may be. Development is about building trust in institutions, including, most importantly, governments. When governments take more from the poor than from the wealthy, sustained trust becomes impossible.

He thought it was the job of the church, not the government to care for the poor and hungry. That, to him, was "pure Christianity." When it came to Larraine though, Pastor Daryl believed a lot of hardship was self-inflicted. "She made some stupid choices, spending her money foolishly..." Making her go without for a while may be the best thing for her, so that she can be reminded, 'Hey, when I make foolish choices there are consequences.' " It was easy to go on about helping "the poor." Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgement you have recorded, that was a more trying matter.

Turgot turned out to be correct regarding this chilling prophecy: “War we ought to shun as the greatest of evils, since it will render impossible for a very long time, and perhaps forever, the reform which is absolutely necessary for the prosperity of the State and for the relief of the people.” In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles. The

The least attractive-sounding of this trinity is the concept of ‘intersectionality’. This is the invitation to spend the rest of our lives attempting to work out each and every identity and vulnerability claim in ourselves and others and then organize along whichever system of justice emerges from the perpetually moving hierarchy which we uncover. It is a system that is not just unworkable but dementing, making demands that are impossible towards ends that are unachievable. But today intersectionality has broken out from the social science departments of the liberal arts colleges from which it originated. It is now taken seriously by a generation of young people and – as we shall see – has become embedded via employment law (specifically through a ‘commitment to diversity’) in all the major corporations and governments. New

Governments love a little inflation. They can add money to the system, keep the economy humming and not have to raise taxes or cut spending to do it. In fact, it is sometimes called “the hidden tax” because it erodes the buying power of our currency. It also allows debtors, like the government, to pay back their creditors with “cheaper dollars.

It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere—mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self. . . . Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are [they are much the same in most countries], how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students.

Baba instilled in us a strong sense of community, and he wanted us to always give to those who didn't have. "You don't give the money to the church, mosque, government, or anyone else for that matter; you give it to the needy yourself. Don't always count on the middle man. The money you are spending in God's name is the money that benefits those in need.

Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured the process of being ritually goosed by the Government. He feels a strong impulse to drive straight to the nearest gun store and spend about ten thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it's just that any kind of government authority gives him the creeps now.

Tibet has not yet been infested by the worst disease of modern life, the everlasting rush. No one overworks here. Officials have an easy life. They turn up at the office late in the morning and leave for their homes early in the afternoon. If an official has guests or any other reason for not coming, he just sends a servant to a colleague and asks him to officiate for him. Women know nothing about equal rights and are quite happy as they are. They spend hours making up their faces, restringing their pearl necklaces, choosing new material for dresses, and thinking how to outshine Mrs. So-and-so at the next party. They do not have to bother about housekeeping, which is all done by the servants. But to show that she is mistress the lady of the house always carries a large bunch of keys around with her. In Lhasa every trifling object is locked up and double-locked. Then there is mah-jongg. At one time this game was a universal passion. People were simply fascinated by it and played it day and night, forgetting everything else—official duties, housekeeping, the family. The stakes were often very high and everyone played—even the servants, who sometimes contrived to lose in a few hours what they had taken years to save. Finally the government found it too much of a good thing. They forbade the game, bought up all the mah-jongg sets, and condemned secret offenders to heavy fines and hard labor. And they brought it off! I would never have believed it, but though everyone moaned and hankered to play again, they respected the prohibition. After mah-jongg had been stopped, it became gradually evident how everything else had been neglected during the epidemic. On Saturdays—the day of rest—people now played chess or halma, or occupied themselves harmlessly with word games and puzzles.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Our living quarters were in the same compound as the Eastern District administration. Government offices were mostly housed in large mansions which had been confiscated from Kuomintang officials and wealthy landlords. All government employees, even senior officials, lived at their office. They were not allowed to cook at home, and all ate in canteens. The canteen was also where everyone got their boiled water, which was fetched in thermos flasks. Saturday was the only day married couples were allowed to spend together. Among officials, the euphemism for making love was 'spending a Saturday." Gradually, this regimented life-style relaxed a bit and married couples were able to spend more time together, but almost all still lived and spent most of their time in their office compounds. My mother's department ran a very broad field of activities, including primary education, health, entertainment, and sounding out public opinion. At the age of twenty-two, my mother was in charge of all these activities for about a quarter of a million people. She was so busy we hardly ever saw her. The government wanted to establish a monopoly (known as 'unified purchasing and marketing') over trade in the basic commodities grain, cotton, edible o'fi, and meat. The idea was to get the peasants to sell these exclusively to the government, which would then ration them out to the urban population and to parts of the country where they were in short supply.

You were a warrior, Lantern. Such men are not renowned for understanding the infinite shades of gray that govern the actions of men. Black and white are your colors.” “Scholars tend to overcomplicate matters,” said Skilgannon. “If a man runs at you with a sword it would be foolish to spend time wondering what led him to such action. Was his childhood scarred by a cruel father? Did his wife leave him for another man? Was he perhaps misinformed about your intentions, and therefore has attacked you in error?” Skilgannon laughed. “Warriors need black and white, Elder Brother. Shades of gray would kill them.” “True,” admitted the abbot, “and yet a greater understanding that there are shades of gray would prevent many wars beginning.

Ugh. Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyone exhausting themselves, miserably haemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: no longer tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. [...] What is the point of entire nation rushing round for six weeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation then fails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted merchandise as fallout? If gifts and cards were completely eradicated, then Christmas as pagan-style twinkly festival to distract from lengthy winter gloom would be lovely. But if government, religious bodies, parents, tradition, etc. insist on Christmas Gift Tax to ruin everything why not make it that everyone must go out and spend £500 on themselves then distribute the items among their relatives and friends to wrap up and give to them instead of this psychic-failure torment?

A pyramid of souls exists, based on the desire to receive. At the base of the pyramid are many souls with small desires, earthly, looking for a comfortable life in an animal-like manner: food, sex, sleep. The next layer comprises fewer souls, those with the urge to acquire wealth. These are people who are willing to invest their entire lives in making money, and who sacrifice themselves for the sake of being rich. Next are those that will do anything to control others, to govern and reach positions of power. An even greater desire, felt by even fewer souls, is for knowledge; these are scientists and academics, who spend their lives engaged in discovering something specific. They are interested in nothing but their all-important discovery. Located at the zenith of the pyramid is the strongest desire, developed by only a small few, for the attainment of the spiritual world. All these levels are built into the pyramid.

Halfway through the second term of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal braintrusters began to worry about mounting popular concern over the national debt. In those days the size of the national debt was on everyone’s mind. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt had talked himself into office, in 1932, in part by promising to hack away at a debt which, even under the frugal Mr. Hoover, the people tended to think of as grown to menacing size. Mr. Roosevelt’s wisemen worried deeply about the mounting tension ... And then, suddenly, the academic community came to the rescue. Economists across the length and breadth of the land were electrified by a theory of debt introduced in England by John Maynard Keynes. The politicians wrung their hands in gratitude. Depicting the intoxicating political consequences of Lord Keynes’s discovery, the wry cartoonist of the Washington Times Herald drew a memorable picture. In the center, sitting on a throne in front of a Maypole, was a jubilant FDR, cigarette tilted almost vertically, a grin on his face that stretched from ear to ear. Dancing about him in a circle, hands clasped together, their faces glowing with ecstasy, the braintrusters, vested in academic robes, sang the magical incantation, the great discovery of Lord Keynes: “We owe it to ourselves.” With five talismanic words, the planners had disposed of the problem of deficit spending. Anyone thenceforward who worried about an increase in the national debt was just plain ignorant of the central insight of modern economics: What do we care how much we - the government - owe so long as we owe it to ourselves? On with the spending. Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect ...

Government, New Englanders believed from the beginning, could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce morals through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools. More than any other group in America, Yankees conceive of government as being run by and for themselves. Everyone is supposed to participate, and there is no greater outrage than to manipulate the political process for private gain. Yankee idealism never died.

3. We believe that people spend their own money more prudently than they spend other people’s money. So goods and services produced in the competitive marketplace are likely to be produced more efficiently and with more regard for real consumer demand than goods produced by government, and thus we should try to keep as many aspects of life as possible outside the control of government.

The country isn’t half worked out because they that governs it won’t let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can’t lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that without all the Government saying — ‘Leave it alone and let us govern.’ Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some other place where a man isn’t crowded and can come to his own. We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that. Therefore, we are going away to be Kings.

Too often have I heard of duty,’ she cried. ‘may I not now spend my life as I will?’ ‘Few may do that with honour,’ he answered. ‘But as for you, lady: did you not accept the charge to govern the people until their lord’s return? If you had not been chosen, then some marshal or captain would have been set in the same place, and he could not ride away from his charge, were he weary of it or no.

Life, Liberty, Property, the Pursuit of Happiness: These are the rights our government was created to protect. When the government confiscates your property to subsidize someone else’s choices, it has gone from protecting your rights to violating them - in the name of giving others what they have not earned. Whether that unearned benefit takes the form of education, health care, Social Security, mortgage assistance or anything else some bureaucrat decides is in the “public interest,” the government’s message is the same: “You earn it, we’ll spend it – your values, rights, and life be damned.

Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care.

Alan Greenspan, who would later become the Federal Reserve chairman, wrote in 1966: [T]he earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy’s books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare and other purposes. . . . In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. . . . This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the “hidden” confiscation of wealth.24

However, at the moment, I believe the more important thing that can be done with the platform I have been given is to try to convince the American populace that we are not one another’s enemies even if a (D) is by some of our names and an (R) by the names of others. Knowing that the future of my grandchildren and everyone else’s is put in jeopardy by a continuation of reckless spending, godless government, and mean-spirited attempts to silence critics leaves me with little choice but to continue to expound on the principles outlined in my prayer breakfast speech and to fight for a bright future for America.

Most people who wonder why our politics are so corrupt can’t draw the line from racist theories of limited democracy to today’s system, but the small group of white men who are funding the effort to turn back the clock on political equality can lay claim to a long ideological pedigree: from the original property requirement to people like John C. Calhoun, who advocated states’ rights and limited government in defense of slavery, to the Supreme Court justices who decided Shelby County and Citizens United. Over the past few decades, a series of money-in-politics lawsuits, including Citizens United, have overturned anticorruption protections, making it possible for a wealthy individual to give more than $3.5 million to a party and its candidates in an election cycle, for corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to get candidates elected or defeated, and for secret money to sway elections. The result is a racially skewed system of influence and electoral gatekeeping that invalidates the voices of most Americans.

You know, Governer, most men do things through a desire to escape pain. Did you ever stop and watch a blind man begging on a street corner? A man passes by hurriedly and suddenly stops still; he looks hurt, annoyed. He goes back and drops a coin in the blind man's cup. Well - maybe he couldn't afford a dime. But the site of the helpless man standing forlornly at a corner hurts him, makes him feel a sense of social responsibility, and so he buys ten cents' worth of relief from social pain. It hurts me too much to see Debs and men like him faced with the possibility of spending years in prison, so I am buying relief too.

The religious and economic alliance represented in the Tea {arty remains misunderstood and out of the public eye. The Tea Party movement was formed primarily as an antitax movement, and that limiting government spending and reducing taxes, drawing on the symbols of the Boston Tea Party. As important as these initial catalysts were, the power for the movement came from its adoption of white evangelical conservatives.

The global aid community is mobilised into fighting drought in a district that gets 1,500 mm of rainfall annually. The reverse spiral begins. Donor governments love emergency relief. It forms a negligible part of their spending, but makes for great advertising. (Emergencies of many sorts do this, not just drought. You can run television footage of the Marines kissing babies in Somalia.) There are more serious issues between rich and poor nations—like unequal trade. Settling those would be of greater help to the latter. But for that, the ‘donors’ would have to part with something for real. No. They prefer emergency relief.

The idea that the GDP still serves as an accurate gauge of social welfare is one of the most widespread myths of our times. Even politicians who fight over everything else can always agree that the GDP must grow. Growth is good. It’s good for employment, it’s good for purchasing power, and it’s good for our government, giving it more to spend. Modern journalism would be all but lost without the GDP, wielding the latest national growth figures as a kind of government report card. A shrinking GDP spells recession and, if it really shrivels, depression. In fact, the GDP offers pretty much everything a journalist could want: hard figures, issued at regular intervals, and the chance to quote experts. Most importantly, the GDP offers a clear benchmark. Is the government doing its job? How do we as a country stack up? Has life gotten a little better? Never fear, we have the latest figures on the GDP, and they’ll tell us everything we need to know. Given our obsession with it, it’s hard to believe that just eighty years ago the GDP didn’t even exist.

When the NSSF fights against legislation designed to prevent mass shootings because it “won’t work and is a violation of rights,” we understand that many people agree with that argument. But that’s not, at all, even a little bit why the organization lobbies so hard. It works hand in hand with the NRA and certain senators, and spends millions of dollars per year for one reason and one reason only: to make more money. And every time a shooting happens, it makes even more money. Yes. For real. When a mass shooting makes national headlines, the gun lobby purposefully stokes up fear and paranoia over proposed new gun laws so that scared citizens get out their checkbooks and buy a new AR-15 (or sporting rifle). So why would the NSSF have any interest in stopping mass shootings? Why would it engage politically and invest in compromise, a reform plan that attempts to make all Americans safer, or any sort of reckoning of the role guns play in gun violence? It won’t. However you feel about guns and their place in America—whether we’re talking about rifles for hunting or assault rifles, or anything in between—it’s undeniable that the gun lobby has refused to acknowledge or entertain any sort of regulation or reform aimed at making us a safer and saner nation. The reason why: because that does not make it more money. A customer base kept terrified at all times that this will be “the last chance before the government bans” whatever gun manufacturers are peddling is much more valuable. A customer base absolutely convinced that the just-about-anyone-can-buy culture we have is politically necessary without seeing that it serves those companies is what they’re after. They have achieved it.

The employee differs from a slave in the fact that he is free to change his job if he can, and in his right to spend his non-working hours as he pleases. The analogy that I wish to bring out is in relation to government. Tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies differed in their relations to free men; in relation to slaves, they were all alike. Similarly in a capitalist industrial enterprise the power may be divided among investors monarchically, oligarchically, or democratically, but employees, unless they are investors, have no share in it whatever, and are thought to have as little claim as slaves were thought to have in antiquity.

When America began, government cost every citizen $20 (in [2003] money) per year. Taxes rose during wars, but for most of the life of America, spending never exceeded a few hundred dollars per person. During World War II, government got much bigger. It was supposed to shrink again after the war but never did. Instead, it just kept growing. Now the federal government costs every man, woman, and child an average of $10,000 per year.

And the irony is that the war purchases are recorded as a positive for economic growth and the GDP. Though the war spending is an economic negative and provides no improvement in the people’s standard of living, the government statisticians brag about an upward blip in the GDP. Besides, these bills are paid for by borrowing and printing money, thus increasing future debt obligations and causing higher prices for the next generation.

In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don't want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf. On the other hand, they demand that the president 'take control.' They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage. They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn't control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn't make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn't want cuts, wants change and doesn't want change.

Then the voice - which identified itself as the prince of this world, the only being who really knows what happens on Earth - began to show him the people around him on the beach. The wonderful father who was busy packing things up and helping his children put on some warm clothes and who would love to have an affair with his secretary, but was terrified on his wife's response. His wife who would like to work and have her independence, but who was terrified of her husband's response. The children who behave themselves because they were terrified of being punished. The girl who was reading a book all on her own beneath the sunshade, pretending she didn't care, but inside was terrified of spending the rest of her life alone. The boy running around with a tennis racuqet , terrified of having to live up to his parents' expectations. The waiter serving tropical drinks to the rich customers and terrified that he could be sacket at any moment. The young girl who wanted to be a dance, but who was studying law instead because she was terrified of what the neighbours might say. The old man who didn't smoke or drink and said he felt much better for it, when in truth it was the terror of death what whispered in his ears like the wind. The married couple who ran by, splashing through the surf, with a smile on their face but with a terror in their hearts telling them that they would soon be old, boring and useless. The man with the suntan who swept up in his launch in front of everybody and waved and smiled, but was terrified because he could lose all his money from one moment to the next. The hotel owner, watching the whole idyllic scene from his office, trying to keep everyone happy and cheerful, urging his accountants to ever greater vigilance, and terrified because he knew that however honest he was government officials would still find mistakes in his accounts if they wanted to. There was terror in each and every one of the people on that beautiful beach and on that breathtakingly beautiful evening. Terror of being alone, terror of the darkness filling their imaginations with devils, terror of doing anything not in the manuals of good behaviour, terror of God's punishing any mistake, terror of trying and failing, terror of succeeding and having to live with the envy of other people, terror of loving and being rejected, terror of asking for a rise in salary, of accepting an invitation, of going somewhere new, of not being able to speak a foreign language, of not making the right impression, of growing old, of dying, of being pointed out because of one's defects, of not being pointed out because of one's merits, of not being noticed either for one's defects of one's merits.

If a country is governed wisely, its inhabitants will be content. They enjoy the labor of their hands and don't waste time inventing labor-saving machines. Since they dearly love their homes, they aren't interested in travel. There may be a few wagons and boats, but these don't go anywhere. There may be an arsenal of weapons, but nobody ever uses them. People enjoy their food, take pleasure in being with their families, spend weekends working in their gardens, delight in the doings of the neighborhood. And even though the next country is so close that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking, they are content to die of old age without ever having gone to see it.

This is because the outcomes of life are not governed by passion; they are governed by principle. You may not think what you did this morning was important, but it was. You may not think that the little things add up, but they do. Consider the age-old brainteaser: Would you rather have $1 million in hand today or a penny that doubles in value every day for the next month? The $1 million right now sounds great, but after a 31-day month, that one penny would be worth over $10 million. Making big, sweeping changes is not difficult because we are flawed, incompetent beings. It’s difficult because we are not meant to live outside of our comfort zones. If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day until those choices are habituated. Then you’ll just continue to do them. If you want to spend less time on your phone, deny yourself the chance to check it one time today. If you want to eat healthier, drink half a cup of water today. If you want to sleep more, go to bed 10 minutes earlier tonight than you did last night. If you want to exercise more, do it now for just 10 minutes. If you want to read, read one page. If you want to meditate, do so for 30 seconds. Then keep doing those things. Do them every single day. You’ll get used to not checking your phone. You’ll want more water, and you’ll drink more water. You’ll run for 10 minutes, and you won’t feel like you have to stop, so you won’t. You’ll read one page, grow interested, and read another. At our most instinctive, physiological level, “change” translates to something dangerous and potentially life-threatening. No wonder why we build our own cages and stay in them, even though there’s no lock on the door. Trying to shock yourself into a new life isn’t going to work, and that’s why it hasn’t yet.

Csikszentmihalyi, who between 1990 and 1995 studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in the arts, sciences, business, and government, many of his subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers.” Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.

Countless aid organizations and governments are convinced that they know what poor people need, and invest in schools, solar panels, or cattle. And, granted, better a cow than no cow. But at what cost? A Rwandan study estimated that donating one pregnant cow costs around $3,000 (including a milking workshop). That’s five years’ wages for a Rwandan.17 Or take the patchwork of courses offered to the poor: Study after study has shown that they cost a lot but achieve little, whether the objective is learning to fish, read, or run a business.18 “Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”19 The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need. And, as it happens, there is one category of product which poor people do not spend their free money on, and that’s alcohol and tobacco. In fact, a major study by the World Bank demonstrated that in 82% of all researched cases in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, alcohol and tobacco consumption actually declined.20

Ever since 1945 the federal government has held and indeed increased its importance as the first customer of the American economy. Government spending had been the primary economic stimulant and to increase it had been the goal of hundreds of interest groups; hopes of balanced budgets and cheap, business-like administration always ran aground upon this fact. What was more, the United States was a democracy; whatever the doctrinaire objections to it, and however much rhetoric might be devoted to attacking it, a welfare state slowly advanced because voters wanted it that way. These facts gradually made the old ideal of totally free enterprise, unchecked and uninvaded by the influence of government, unreal.

The U.S. government, contending that many Osage were unable to handle their money, had required the Office of Indian Affairs to determine which members of the tribe it considered capable of managing their trust funds. Over the tribe’s vehement objections, many Osage, including Lizzie and Anna, were deemed “incompetent,” and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store.

I work at T-Town, which is about ninety-nine percent men, and all of them either are alpha personalities or think they are. That said, what we have here is the standard dynamic for sexual tension. I'm moderately good-looking. I have big boobs, and I get hit on by everyone from the pastor of my church to baristas at Starbucks, and by every single guy at T-Town except for my boss and the range master. I don't blame them and I don't judge them. It's part of the procreative drive hardwired into us, and we haven't evolved as a species far enough exert any genuine control over the biological imperative. You, on the other hand, are a very good-looking man of prime breeding age. Old enough to have interesting lines and scars--and stories to go with them--and young enough to be a catch. You probably get laid as often as you want to, and you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times women have said no to you. Maybe--and please correct me if I've strayed too far into speculation--being an agent of a secret government organization has led you to buy into the superspy sex stud propaganda perpetuated by James Bond films." "My name is Powers," I said. "Austin Powers." She ignored me and plowed ahead. "We're in the middle of a crisis. We may have to work closely together for several days, or even several weeks. Close-quarters travel, emotions running high, all that. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not spend the next few days living inside a trite office romance cliche. That includes everything from mild flirtation to sexual innuendo and double entendre and the whole ball of wax." She sipped her Coke. The ball landed in my court with a thump.

In the Sixties, the hippies used to say, "Never trust anyone over 30." Now all the Sixties hippies are in their sixties, and they've gone quiet about that, but it's good advice for you: never trust anyone over 30 with the societal checkbook. You thought you were the idealistic youth of the Obama era, but in fact you're the designated fall-guys. You weren't voting for "the future," but to deny yourself the very possibility of one--like turkeys volunteering to waddle around with an "Audacity of Thanksgiving" bumper sticker on your tush. Instead of swaying glassy-eyed behind President Obama at his campaign rallies singing "We are the hopeychange," you should have been demanding that the government spend less money on small agencies with fewer employees on smaller salaries. Because if you don't, there won't be a future. "You can be anything you want to be"--but only if you first tell today's big spenders that, whatever they want to be, they should try doing it on their own dime.

On economic matters Garrett had a brilliant simplicity. In November 1913, while editor of the Annalist, he began a monthly column on money in Everybody’s, writing as John Parr. One of the most common questions from readers was why the government simply didn’t print money to spend on public works, instead of borrowing it at interest. It was a variant of the Coxey idea. Garrett explained that money is not wealth, but a claim on wealth, and that you do not add to wealth by creating more claims to it.4

The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children. In total, Walmart benefits from more than $7 billion in subsidies each year from taxpayers like you. Those “low, low prices” are made possible by low, low wages—and by the taxes you pay to keep those workers alive on their low, low pay. As I said earlier, I don’t think that anyone who works full-time should live in poverty. I also don’t think that bazillion-dollar companies like Walmart ought to funnel profits to shareholders while paying such low wages that taxpayers must pick up the ticket for their employees’ food, shelter, and medical care. I listen to right-wing loudmouths sound off about what an outrage welfare is and I think, “Yeah, it stinks that Walmart has been sucking up so much government assistance for so long.” But somehow I suspect that these guys aren’t talking about Walmart the Welfare Queen. Walmart isn’t alone. Every year, employers like retailers and fast-food outlets pay wages that are so low that the rest of America ponies up a collective $153 billion to subsidize their workers. That’s $153 billion every year. Anyone want to guess what we could do with that mountain of money? We could make every public college tuition-free and pay for preschool for every child—and still have tens of billions left over. We could almost double the amount we spend on services for veterans, such as disability, long-term care, and ending homelessness. We could double all federal research and development—everything: medical, scientific, engineering, climate science, behavioral health, chemistry, brain mapping, drug addiction, even defense research. Or we could more than double federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, dams and levees, water treatment plants, safe new water pipes. Yeah, the point I’m making is blindingly obvious. America could do a lot with the money taxpayers spend to keep afloat people who are working full-time but whose employers don’t pay a living wage. Of course, giant corporations know they have a sweet deal—and they plan to keep it, thank you very much. They have deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers to fight off any efforts to give workers a chance to organize or fight for a higher wage. Giant corporations have used their mouthpiece, the national Chamber of Commerce, to oppose any increase in the minimum wage, calling it a “distraction” and a “cynical effort” to increase union membership. Lobbyists grow rich making sure that people like Gina don’t get paid more. The

The continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those seventeen European countries that have fallen into the "lowest-low fertility," where are the children? In a way, you're looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk cafe listening to his iPod, the eternal adolescent charges of the paternalistic state. The government makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection...the long-term cost of welfare is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to have total choice over their satellite TV package, yet think it perfectly normal to allow the state to make all the choices in respect of their health care. It's a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latter-day Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

New Rule: Republicans must stop pitting the American people against the government. Last week, we heard a speech from Republican leader Bobby Jindal--and he began it with the story that every immigrant tells about going to an American grocery store for the first time and being overwhelmed with the "endless variety on the shelves." And this was just a 7-Eleven--wait till he sees a Safeway. The thing is, that "endless variety"exists only because Americans pay taxes to a government, which maintains roads, irrigates fields, oversees the electrical grid, and everything else that enables the modern American supermarket to carry forty-seven varieties of frozen breakfast pastry.Of course, it's easy to tear government down--Ronald Reagan used to say the nine most terrifying words in the Englishlanguage were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." But that was before "I'm Sarah Palin, now show me the launch codes."The stimulus package was attacked as typical "tax and spend"--like repairing bridges is left-wing stuff. "There the liberals go again, always wanting to get across the river." Folks, the people are the government--the first responders who put out fires--that's your government. The ranger who shoos pedophiles out of the park restroom, the postman who delivers your porn.How stupid is it when people say, "That's all we need: the federal government telling Detroit how to make cars or Wells Fargo how to run a bank. You want them to look like the post office?"You mean the place that takes a note that's in my hand in L.A. on Monday and gives it to my sister in New Jersey on Wednesday, for 44 cents? Let me be the first to say, I would be thrilled if America's health-care system was anywhere near as functional as the post office.Truth is, recent years have made me much more wary of government stepping aside and letting unregulated private enterprise run things it plainly is too greedy to trust with. Like Wall Street. Like rebuilding Iraq.Like the way Republicans always frame the health-care debate by saying, "Health-care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not government bureaucrats," leaving out the fact that health-care decisions aren't made by doctors, patients, or bureaucrats; they're made by insurance companies. Which are a lot like hospital gowns--chances are your gas isn't covered.

Ultimately this is not merely about dreary yet didactic statistics but, as Dr. Williams insisted, it is about morality. The devastating consequences of wealth redistribution, intergenerational thievery, massive federal spending, endless borrowing, and unimaginable debt accumulation on American society, and most particularly on the ruling generation and future generations, are a travesty. Stealing from the future does not establish the utopia promised by the statists. It is the rising generation’s grave moral failure.

What prompts alarm in me is how you and your government want to ruin not only the potential of this of this country, but also the path of those who are going to transition into more advanced beings in search of immortality and omnipotence, and maybe even participate in a great singularity. These advances are going to pass, one way or another. And your current second-rate moral system—your weak, pretend-God-will-take-care-of-us bullshit—is a waste for our species' possibilities. You people want to pretend that democracy, religious inspiration, and unbridled consumerism are going to last forever and carry us all to bliss; that the American Dream is right around the next corner for everyone. you spend hundreds of billions of dollars on lazy welfare recipients, on mentally challenged people, on uneducated repeat criminals, on obese second-rate citizens bankrupting our medical system, on murderous war machines fighting for oil and your oligarchy's pet projects in far off places. All so you maintain your puny forms of power and sleep better at night.

When foreign military spending [bombing Korea and Vietnam] forced the U.S. balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative by default was to invest their subsequent payments inflows in U.S. Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.” Central banks have been holding some $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves for the past few years — and these loans have financed most of the U.S. Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades. Given the fact that about half of U.S. Government discretionary spending is for military operations — including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries — the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with U.S. buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.

It’s not easy to feel good about yourself when you are constantly being told you’re rubbish and/or part of the problem. That’s often the situation for people working in the public sector, whether these be nurses, civil servants or teachers. The static metrics used to measure the contribution of the public sector, and the influence of Public Choice theory on making governments more ‘efficient’, has convinced many civil-sector workers they are second-best. It’s enough to depress any bureaucrat and induce him or her to get up, leave and join the private sector, where there is often more money to be made. So public actors are forced to emulate private ones, with their almost exclusive interest in projects with fast paybacks. After all, price determines value. You, the civil servant, won’t dare to propose that your agency could take charge, bring a helpful long-term perspective to a problem, consider all sides of an issue (not just profitability), spend the necessary funds (borrow if required) and – whisper it softly – add public value. You leave the big ideas to the private sector which you are told to simply ‘facilitate’ and enable. And when Apple or whichever private company makes billions of dollars for shareholders and many millions for top executives, you probably won’t think that these gains actually come largely from leveraging the work done by others – whether these be government agencies, not-for-profit institutions, or achievements fought for by civil society organizations including trade unions that have been critical for fighting for workers’ training programmes.

Why, if economic freedom has proven itself time and time again to be the engine of prosperity, do we keep moving toward Big Government? Why is a pro-freedom agenda so hard to come by and to defend? Why, no matter the rhetoric, no matter the mood of the electorate, no matter how much the weight of Big Government pulls down economic progress, do we get more regulations, more government spending, less economic freedom? The answer might surprise you. It has to do with something we don’t often talk about in explicit terms. It has to do with morality.

Yes, it is America. It is an essential part of American history. So too is the backlash that occurs when attempts are made to improve the conditions of the poor. Whether it is New Deal polices or LBJ’s welfare programs or Obama-era health care reform, along with any effort to address inequality and poverty comes a harsh and seemingly inevitable reaction. Angry citizens lash out: they perceive government bending over backward to help the poor (implied or stated: undeserving) and they accuse bureaucrats of wasteful spending that steals from hardworking men and women.

Every special group around the country tries to get its hands on whatever bits and pieces it can. The result is that there is hardly an issue on which government is not on both sides. For example, in one massive building in Washington some government employees are working full-time trying to devise and implement plans to spend our money to discourage us from smoking cigarettes. In another massive building, perhaps miles away from the first, other employees, equally dedicated, equally hard-working, are working full-time spending our money to subsidize farmers to grow tobacco.

Any system that penalizes success and accomplishment is wrong. Any system that discourages work, discourages productivity, discourages economic progress, is wrong. If, on the other hand, you reduce tax rates and allow people to spend or save more of what they earn, they’ll be more industrious; they’ll have more incentive to work hard, and money they earn will add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress. The result: more prosperity for all—and more revenue for government. A few economists call this principle supply-side economics. I just call it common sense.

My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births. Infant mortality is such a powerful indicator because low rates are impossible to achieve without having a combination of several critical conditions that define good quality of life—good healthcare in general, and appropriate prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal care in particular; proper maternal and infant nutrition; adequate and sanitary living conditions; and access to social support for disadvantaged families—and that are also predicated on relevant government and private spending, and on infrastructures and incomes that can maintain usage and access. A single variable thus captures a number of prerequisites for the near-universal survival of the most critical period of life: the first year.

Indeed, in government, the worse a government agency performs, the more money it can claim from a legislature, city council, or county commission. If state-run schools fail to educate children, then obviously they need more money (even if government-run schools often already spend several times more per student than private schools do). If the welfare state fails to reduce, or actually increases, poverty then obviously, say the bureaucrats, we need to expand welfare programs even further. The Obama administration actually bragged about expanding food stamp rolls and claimed they were good for the economy.

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism’s egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care. Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just

Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogeneous cities.

Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.

I spend a lot of time with young people now, bright, public-spirited kids from across the political spectrum who give me hope for the future...They want to have an impact, but they're not sure that politics is a viable path on which to do that. Congress is going to meet with you or without you, I tell them. Don't turn away in disgust and leave those decisions to someone else. You don't like politics today? Grab the wheel of history and steer us to a better place. Run for office. Be a strategist or policy aide. Work for a government agency or a non-profit. Become a thoughtful, probing journalist. Get in the arena. Help shape the world in which you're going to live. At a minimum, be the engaged citizen a healthy democracy demands.

Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own. But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state? The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

There is a major difference between theoretical knowledge and experiential knowledge. Academics think they know how the economy should work; successful business owners know how the economy does work. They have been there and done it. Our government should be turning to those who have experiential knowledge when it comes to solving our fiscal problems. They would realize that many of their current policies may sound good but don’t work in the real world and must be abandoned. They would spend less and live within their means. They would be promoting the creation of more entrepreneurs and business owners, instead of hiring more bureaucrats, consulting more academics, and enlisting more lawyers to harass and prosecute the true wealth creators of this nation.

Perhaps the creeping effort to restrict civil liberties wouldn’t have brought people into the streets, at least not immediately. But Allende’s economic programs hit them directly. His announced policy of “first consumption, then accumulation” was an economic disaster waiting to happen. In 1971, the inflation rate was 20 percent, kept somewhat in check by the expenditure of the government’s foreign reserves, but in 1972, with the government spending lavishly to support its social and economic policies, it jumped to 78 percent, and in 1973 to an unprecedented 353 percent. No country in the world had a higher rate. Then the attempt to rein in prices through government controls led to shortages of basic consumer goods and the rise of black markets. People were waiting in line to buy toothpaste.

Growing religious fundamentalism is directly linked to globalization and to privatization. The Indian government is talking about selling its entire power sector to foreign multinationals, but when the consequences of that become hard to manage, the government immediately starts saying, "Should we build the Ram temple in Ayodhya?" Everyone goes baying off in that direction. Meanwhile, contracts are signed. It's like a game. That's something we have to understand. It's like a pincer action. With one hand they're selling the country out to multinationals. With the other they're orchestrating this howling cultural nationalism. On the one hand you're saying that the world is a global village. On the other hand governments spend millions and millions patrolling their borders with nuclear weapons.

But in writing your constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative! Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies . . . no interference however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation . . . no involuntary taxation. Comrades, if you were to spend five years in a study of history while thinking of more and more things that your government should promise never to do and then let your constitution be nothing but those negatives, I would not fear the outcome. “What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well- intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing.

Here’s the dirty little secret about poverty programs: They aren’t about ending poverty—they are about perpetuating government programs and private sector enterprises that make up what I call the “industry of poverty.” Yes, poverty is a condition for poor people, but it’s a career for those who administer the programs and who would be put out of business if they were actually successful in eradicating poverty, so rest assured, they will never eradicate it. Trust me on this—the biggest fights I ever had as governor were trying to take money from a “provider” that should have gone to someone who was actually poor and needed it. Federal welfare spending has risen 375 percent (in constant 2011 dollars) since 1965 and total welfare spending has climbed almost as much, writes Tennant. If money solved the problem, we wouldn’t have a problem.

A prohibition on the hoarding or possession of gold was integral to the plan to devalue the dollar against gold and get people spending again. Against this background, FDR issued Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933, one of the most extraordinary executive orders in U.S. history. The blunt language over the signature of Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaks for itself: I, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . declare that [a] national emergency still continues to exist and . . . do hereby prohibit the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the . . . United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations.... All persons are hereby required to deliver, on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal reserve bank . . . or to any member of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates now owned by them.... Whoever willfully violates any provision of this Executive Order . . . may be fined not more than $10,000 or . . . may be imprisoned for not more than ten years. The people of the United States were being ordered to surrender their gold to the government and were offered paper money at the exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce. Some relatively minor exceptions were made for dentists, jewelers and others who made “legitimate and customary” use of gold in their industry or art. Citizens were allowed to keep $100 worth of gold, about five ounces at 1933 prices, and gold in the form of rare coins. The $10,000 fine proposed in 1933 for those who continued to hoard gold in violation of the president’s order is equivalent to over $165,000 in today’s money, an extraordinarily large statutory fine. Roosevelt followed up with a

From start to finish, what private charities do represents a manifestation of free will. No one is compelled to provide assistance. No one is coerced to pay for it. No one is required to accept it. All parties come together of their own volition. And therein lies the magic of it all! The link between the giver, the provider, and the receiver is strong precisely because each knows he can walk away from it at the slightest hint of insincerity, broken promises, or poor performance. Because each party gives his own time or resources voluntarily, he tends to focus on the mission and doesn’t get bogged down in secondary agendas like filling out the proper paperwork or currying favor with those in power. Management expert Peter Drucker summed it up well when he said that private charities, both faith-based and secular, “spend far less for results than governments spend for failure.

I’m about as political as a Bengal tiger. . . . I have a feeling that a nation is more than just government, laws and rules. It’s an attitude. It’s the people’s outlook. Dean Martin once asked me what I wanted for my baby daughter, and I realize now that my answer was kind of an attitude toward my country. Well, he asked me this on election day and the bars were closed anyway, so he had a lot of time to listen and I told him. . . . I told him that I wanted for my daughter Marisa what most parents want for their children. I wanted to stick around long enough to see that she got a good start and I would like her to know some of the values that we knew as kids, some of the values that an articulate few now are saying are old-fashioned. But most of all I want her to be grateful, as I am grateful for every day of my life that I spend in the United States of America. . . . I don’t care whether she ever memorizes the Gettysburg Address or not, but I want her to understand it, and since very few little girls are asked to defend their country, she will probably never have to raise her hand to that oath, but I want her to respect all who do. I guess that is what I want for my girl. That is what I want for my country, and that’s what I want for the men that you people are going to pick from here to go shape our destinies.

Thiel’s loathing for government spending did not apply when the government spent money on him. His next big startup, Palantir—a name borrowed from Tolkien—depended for survival upon the least transparent, least accountable, and most profligate extension of the federal government, the CIA. The agency invested in Thiel through its Silicon Valley VC front, In-Q-Tel. With Palantir, this self-described “civil libertarian” became an important player in the growth of a secretive, invasive, and patently unconstitutional global surveillance apparatus. Asked in a 2014 online chat if Palantir was “a front for the CIA,” Thiel replied, “No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.” With 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget going to the private sector, this dismissive wisecrack was not so much an outright denial as it was a sly wink at the extent of corporate dominance over even the most powerful federal agencies.

What was critical to my father was that we not "go into government". His father and mother had both worked in the Treasury Department; and to him, "going into government" meant getting "hooked" on the salary and job security, and spending the rest of one's life in predictable, routinized labor that stunted the mind and sapped the spirit. My father would tell us of accountant friends who had passed their C.P.A. exam, then gone to work for the generous starting salaries offered by the I.R.S. While he was struggling in his mid-twenties, they were bragging about the cash they were taking home. Now, he said, he rarely saw them. Now, they had a defeated look; now, they were taking orders from some bureaucrat, and would be taking orders for the rest of their lives. He admired the disposition to roll the dice and risk everything that his Jewish friends and clients, Benny Ouresman, the Chevrolet dealer, and Harry Viner and his son Melvin, who had made a fortune with Sunshine Laundry, had exhibited. "They didn't have a damn dime when they started," Pop would tell us, emphatically. "They went to friends, borrowed money, started a business, went broke, went back to their friends, borrowed again, went broke again. Finally, they made it. They built something of their own. Now they work for themselves, and everybody else works for them. Be your own man!" That was the attitude we should adopt.

From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper. From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character. From my mother, piety and beneficence and abstinence not only from evil deeds but even from evil thoughts and further simplicity in my way of living far removed from the habits of the rich. From my great-grandfather not to have frequented public schools and to have had good teachers at home and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally. From my tutor to be neither of the green nor of the blue party at the games in the circus nor a partisan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius of the gladiators fights, from him too I learned to endure pain and to want little and to work with my own hands and not to meddle with other people's affairs and not to be ready to listen to slander. From Diognetus not to get excited about trifling things and not to give credit to what was said by miracle workers and sorcerers about incantations and driving away demons and such things; and not to breed quails for fighting nor to give myself up to a passion for such things and to allow people to have their say. And to have become intimate with philosophy and have gone to hear Bacchius and then Tandasis and Marcianus; and to have written essays in my youth; and have been happy with a plank bed and a hide for covering and whatever else goes with the greek discipline.

There are, as you have just seen, two agendas being pursued here tonight," the Countess lectured amiably. "The political one of the old men—an annual renewal of the forms of the Vor—and the genetic agenda of the old women. The men imagine theirs is the only one, but that's just an ego-serving self-delusion. The whole Vor system is founded on the women's game, underneath. The old men in government councils spend their lives arguing against or scheming to fund this or that bit of off-planet military hardware. Meanwhile, the uterine replicator is creeping in past their guard, and they aren't even conscious that the debate that will fundamentally alter Barrayar's future is being carried on right now among their wives and daughters. To use it, or not to use it? Too late to keep it out, it's already here. The middle classes are picking it up in droves. Every mother who loves her daughter is pressing for it, to spare her the physical dangers of biological childbearing. They're fighting not the old men, who haven't got a clue, but an old guard of their sisters who say to their daughters, in effect, We had to suffer, so must you! Look around tonight, Mark. You're witnessing the last generation of men and women on Barrayar who will dance this dance in the old way. The Vor system is about to change on its blindest side, the side that looks to—or fails to look to—its foundation. Another half generation from now, it's not going to know what hit it.

What we feel and how we feel is far more important than what we think and how we think. Feeling is the stuff of which our consciousness is made, the atmosphere in which all our thinking and all our conduct is bathed. All the motives which govern and drive our lives are emotional. Love and hate, anger and fear, curiosity and joy are the springs of all that is most noble and most detestable in the history of men and nations. The opening sentence of a sermon is an opportunity. A good introduction arrests me. It handcuffs me and drags me before the sermon, where I stand and hear a Word that makes me both tremble and rejoice. The best sermon introductions also engage the listener immediately. It’s a rare sermon, however, that suffers because of a good introduction. Mysteries beg for answers. People’s natural curiosity will entice them to stay tuned until the puzzle is solved. Any sentence that points out incongruity, contradiction, paradox, or irony will do. Talk about what people care about. Begin writing an introduction by asking, “Will my listeners care about this?” (Not, “Why should they care about this?”) Stepping into the pulpit calmly and scanning the congregation to the count of five can have a remarkable effect on preacher and congregation alike. It is as if you are saying, “I’m about to preach the Word of God. I want all of you settled. I’m not going to begin, in fact, until I have your complete attention.” No sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as crystal. The getting of that sentence is the hardest, most exacting, and most fruitful labor of study. We tend to use generalities for compelling reasons. Specifics often take research and extra thought, precious commodities to a pastor. Generalities are safe. We can’t help but use generalities when we can’t remember details of a story or when we want anonymity for someone. Still, the more specific their language, the better speakers communicate. I used to balk at spending a large amount of time on a story, because I wanted to get to the point. Now I realize the story gets the point across better than my declarative statements. Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. Limits—that is, form—challenge the mind, forcing creativity. Needless words weaken our offense. Listening to some speakers, you have to sift hundreds of gallons of water to get one speck of gold. If the sermon is so complicated that it needs a summary, its problems run deeper than the conclusion. The last sentence of a sermon already has authority; when the last sentence is Scripture, this is even more true. No matter what our tone or approach, we are wise to craft the conclusion carefully. In fact, given the crisis and opportunity that the conclusion presents—remember, it will likely be people’s lasting memory of the message—it’s probably a good practice to write out the conclusion, regardless of how much of the rest of the sermon is written. It is you who preaches Christ. And you will preach Christ a little differently than any other preacher. Not to do so is to deny your God-given uniqueness. Aim for clarity first. Beauty and eloquence should be added to make things even more clear, not more impressive. I’ll have not praise nor time for those who suppose that writing comes by some divine gift, some madness, some overflow of feeling. I’m especially grim on Christians who enter the field blithely unprepared and literarily innocent of any hard work—as though the substance of their message forgives the failure of its form.

The great irony, then, is that the nation’s most famous modern conservative economist became the father of Big Government, chronic deficits, and national fiscal bankruptcy. It was Friedman who first urged the removal of the Bretton Woods gold standard restraints on central bank money printing, and then added insult to injury by giving conservative sanction to perpetual open market purchases of government debt by the Fed. Friedman’s monetarism thereby institutionalized a régime which allowed politicians to chronically spend without taxing. Likewise, it was the free market professor of the Chicago school who also blessed the fundamental Keynesian proposition that Washington must continuously manage and stimulate the national economy. To be sure, Friedman’s “freshwater” proposition, in Paul Krugman’s famous paradigm, was far more modest than the vast “fine-tuning” pretensions of his “salt-water” rivals. The saltwater Keynesians of the 1960s proposed to stimulate the economy until the last billion dollars of potential GDP was realized; that is, they would achieve prosperity by causing the state to do anything that was needed through a multiplicity of fiscal interventions. By contrast, the freshwater Keynesian, Milton Friedman, thought that capitalism could take care of itself as long as it had precisely the right quantity of money at all times; that is, Friedman would attain prosperity by causing the state to do the one thing that was needed through the single spigot of M1 growth.

The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic Frisby points out in his book Life After the State, opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury. The state spends money before it even exists; the privileged banks then get first access to newly minted money and can invest it before assets have increased in cost. By the time it reaches ordinary people, the money is worth less. This outward percolation is known as the Cantillon Effect – after Richard Cantillon, who noticed that the creation of paper money in the South Sea Bubble benefited those closest to the source first. Frisby argues that the process of money creation by an expansionary government effectively redistributes money from the poor to the rich. ‘This is not the free market at work, but a gross, unintended economic distortion caused by the colossal government intervention.’ The

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who 'but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.

Roosevelt won because he created a new kind of interest-group politics. The idea that Americans might form a political group that demanded something from government was well known and thoroughly reported a century earlier by Alexis de Tocqueville. The idea that such groups might find mainstream parties to support them was not novel either: Republicans, including the Harding and Coolidge administrations, had long practiced interest-group politics on behalf of big business. But Roosevelt systematized interest-group politics more generally to include many constituencies—labor, senior citizens, farmers, union workers. The president made groups where only individual citizens or isolated cranks had stood before, ministered to those groups, and was rewarded with votes. It is no coincidence that the first peacetime year in American history in which federal spending outpaced the total spending of the states and towns was that election year of 1936. It can even be argued that one year—1936—created the modern entitlement challenge that so bedevils both parties only.

Meanwhile, the state has grown as addicted to the lottery as its problem gamblers. Lottery proceeds now account for 13 percent of the state revenues in Massachusetts, making radical change all but unthinkable. No politician, however troubled by the lottery's harmful effects, would dare raise taxes or cut spending sufficiently to offset the revenue the lottery brings in. With states hooked on the money, they have no choice but to continue to bombard their citizens, especially the most vulnerable ones, with a message at odds with the ethic of work, sacrifice and moral responsibility that sustains democratic life. This civic corruption is the gravest harm that lotteries bring. It degrades the public realm by casting the government as the purveyor of a perverse civic education. To keep the money flowing, state governments across American must now use their authority and influence not to cultivate civic virtue but to peddle false hope. They must persuade their citizens that with a little luck they can escape the world of work to which only misfortune cosigns them.

There were massive protests in debtor nations such as Greece, and Obama indirectly lectured Merkel that austerity policies might destroy the fragile recovery. Some nations agreed with him, such as France, which went “all in” by electing an outright socialist, François Hollande, as President and giving him a socialist Parliament. Hollande imposed the predictable economic solutions of punishing the successful, including a controversial 75 percent millionaire’s tax. These measures caused capital to flee from France and even led French film icon Gerard Depardieu to give up his French passport and move to Belgium and be granted citizenship by Russia, which charges him a 6 percent income tax rate. (I hear that in exchange, he must appear in every movie made in Russia, the way he did in France.) Panicking at the public revolt, Hollande promised to enact some market-based reforms, such as cutting spending to reduce the deficit, enacting some pro-growth policies, and capping government worker salaries. But it was too little too late. The voters took a sharp right turn in the next election. Sound familiar?

no matter how you look at the issue, prevention is a fundamentally preferable and more cost-effective way to promote health and longevity. Most people agree that we invest insufficiently in prevention, but they would also surmise that it is difficult to get young, healthy people to avoid behaviors that increase their risk of future illness. Consider smoking, which causes more preventable deaths than any major risk factor (the other big ones being physical inactivity, poor diet, and alcohol abuse). After prolonged legal battles, public health efforts to discourage smoking have managed to halve the percentage of Americans who smoke since the 1950s.19 Yet 20 percent of Americans still smoke, causing 443,000 premature deaths in 2011 at a direct cost of $96 billion per year. Likewise, most Americans know they should be physically active and eat a healthy diet, yet only 20 percent of Americans meet the government’s recommendations for physical activity, and fewer than 20 percent meet government dietary guidelines.20 There are many, diverse reasons we are bad at persuading, nudging, or otherwise encouraging people to use their bodies more as they evolved to be used (more on this later), but one contributing factor could be that we are still following in the footsteps of the marquis de Condorcet, waiting for the next promised breakthrough. Scared of death and hopeful about science, we spend billions of dollars trying to figure out how to regrow diseased organs, hunting for new drugs, and designing artifical body parts to replace the ones we wear out. I am in no way suggesting that we cease investing in these and other areas. Quite the contrary: let’s spend more! But let’s not do so in a way that promotes the pernicious feedback loop of just treating mismatch diseases rather than preventing them. In practical

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation – "It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?" Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions. Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen. But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen." It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

What is America to do about the rising tide of horror? Visitors from Europe or Japan shake their heads in wonder at the squalor and barbarity of America’s cities. They could be forgiven for thinking that the country had viciously and deliberately neglected its poor and its blacks. Of course, it has not. Since the 1960s, the United States has poured a staggering amount of money into education, housing, welfare, Medicaid, and uplift programs of every kind. Government now spends $240 billion a year to fight poverty,1278 and despite the widespread notion that spending was curtailed during Republican administrations, it has actually gone up steadily, at a rate that would have astonished the architects of the Great Society. Federal spending on the poor, in real 1989 dollars, quadrupled from 1965 to 1975, and has nearly doubled since then.1279 As the economist Walter Williams has pointed out, with all the money spent on poverty since the 1960s, the government could have bought every company on the Fortune 500 list and nearly all the farmland in America.1280 What do we have to show for three decades and $2.5 trillion worth of war on poverty? The truth is that these programs have not worked. The truth that America refuses to see is that these programs have made things worse.

Many Christians live their lives as though Jesus finished His work in the first century. They seem to think that being a Christian is simply accepting the finished work of Christ, going to church every Sunday to express their worship, and waiting for His second coming. No, no, no. Jesus is working today, just as He did 2,000 years ago, to accomplish His cosmic mission... Some people can grasp the idea that Jesus goes to work every day, just like we do. Or conversely, and more correctly, we go to work every day, just like Jesus does. He told His disciples, "My father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working" (John 5:17). He still is. The central task of the universe today is extending the kingdom of God into every corner of human life, one follower at a time, one conversation at a time. That's what Jesus is concentrating on, and that's what we should be spending the best part of our time and energy doing. You may have assumed that the most important thing you could be doing with your life is selling carpet... raising kids... governing... discovering a cure for cancer... or pastoring the second-largest church in a small town. Those are all worthwhile endeavors, but each one of those tasks is only significant when it is a subtask of the grand objective: building the kingdom of God.

It is not quite true that the Swiss do not have a government. What they do not have is a large central government, or what the common discourse describes as “the” government— what governs them is entirely bottom-up, municipal of sorts, regional entities called cantons, near-sovereign mini-states united in a confederation. There is plenty of volatility, with enmities between residents that stay at the level of fights over water fountains or other such uninspiring debates. This is not necessarily pleasant, since neighbors are transformed into busybodies— this is a dictatorship from the bottom, not from the top, but a dictatorship nevertheless. But this bottom-up form of dictatorship provides protection against the romanticism of utopias, since no big ideas can be generated in such an unintellectual atmosphere— it suffices to spend some time in cafés in the old section of Geneva, particularly on a Sunday afternoon, to understand that the process is highly unintellectual, devoid of any sense of the grandiose, even downright puny (there is a famous quip about how the greatest accomplishment of the Swiss was inventing the cuckoo clock while other nations produced great works— nice story except that the Swiss did not invent the cuckoo clock). But the system produces stability— boring stability— at every possible level.

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

I am aware I may be here reminded of the necessity of rendering instruction agreeable to youth, and of Tasso's infusion of honey into the medicine prepared for a child; but an age in which children are taught the driest doctrines by the insinuating method of instructive games, has little reason to dread the consequences of study being rendered too serious or severe. The history of England is now reduced to a game at cards, the problems of mathematics to puzzles and riddles, and the doctrines of arithmetic may, we are assured, be sufficiently acquired by spending a few hours a-week at a new and complicated edition of the Royal Game of the Goose. There wants but one step further, and the Creed and Ten Commandments may be taught in the same manner, without the necessity of the grave face, deliberate tone of recital, and devout attention hitherto exacted from the well-governed childhood of this realm. It may in the mean time be subject to serious consideration, whether those who are accustomed only to acquire instruction through the medium of amusement, may not be brought to reject that which approaches under the aspect of study; whether those who learn history by the cards, may not be led to prefer the means to the end; and whether, were we to teach religion in the way of sport, our pupils might not thereby be gradually induced to make sport of their religion.

Like the Internet, environmentalism stretches back a long way, yet many people believe Al Gore invented it. There’s no question that Gore’s slideshow-turned-film documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, gave a huge jumpstart to the global warming … sorry, “climate change” … wait, sorry, “climate disruption” … no, hold on, “climate chaos” movement. (If the science is settled, why do they have to keep changing its name?) I won’t bother recounting all the challenges to Gore’s claims, as many others have already done so; or the widely noted disparities between the Spartan existence Gore prescribes for the rest of humanity and his own opulent, jet-set lifestyle. I’ll just point out what I consider the most damning fact of all: While he was prophesying that global warming would cause a twenty-foot sea-level rise by the year 2100, flooding coastal areas and leaving hundreds of millions homeless (a claim debunked by a University of Montana study), he spent nearly $9 million on an oceanfront mansion in the limousine-liberal enclave of Montecito, California [USA Today, “How Green Is Al Gore’s $9 Million Montecito Oceanfront Villa?” May 18, 2010]. If he truly believed in his own message, wouldn’t it have been wiser to spend $1 million on a mansion in Phoenix, Arizona, and then just wait for it to become oceanfront property? It’s no surprise that the biggest proponent of expanding government to combat “climate disruption” is also among the biggest emitters of hot gas.

We've reached a point in human history where higher education no longer works. As a result of technology, higher education in its traditional college setting no longer works. It will never be effective or progressive enough to keep up with the growing needs of employers who look to college institutions for their future employees. I can appreciate the good intent the college system set out to achieve. For previous generations, the formula actually worked. Students enrolled into universities that were affordable, they gained marketable skills and they earned good jobs. Since there was a proven track record of success, parents instilled the value of college in their children thinking they would achieve the same success story they did, but unfortunately Wall Street was watching. Wall Street, the federal government and the college system ganged up and skyrocketed the cost of tuition to record highs. This was easy to do because not only did they have posters blanketing high schools showing kids what a loser they would be if they didn't go to college, they also had Mom and Dad at home telling them the same thing. This system - spending 4+ years pursuing a college education when the world is changing at the speed of light - no longer works and it's not fixable. We now have the biggest employer's market in human history, where employers have their pick of the litter, and because of this employees will get paid less and less and benefits will continue to erode.

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds. More than $4 million of government largesse flows each year into the Colorado City public school district—which, according to the Phoenix New Times, “is operated primarily for the financial benefit of the FLDS Church and for the personal enrichment of FLDS school district leaders.” Reporter John Dougherty determined that school administrators have “plundered the district’s treasury by running up thousands of dollars in personal expenses on district credit cards, purchasing expensive vehicles for their personal use and engaging in extensive travel. The spending spree culminated in December [2000], when the district purchased a $220,000 Cessna 210 airplane to facilitate trips by district personnel to cities across Arizona.” Colorado City has received $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to pave its streets, improve the fire department, and upgrade the water system. Immediately south of the city limits, the federal government built a $2.8 million airport that serves almost no one beyond the fundamentalist community. Thirty-three percent of the town’s residents receive food stamps—compared to the state average of 4.7 percent. Currently the residents of Colorado City receive eight dollars in government services for every dollar they pay in taxes; by comparison, residents in the rest of Mohave County, Arizona, receive just over a dollar in services per tax dollar paid. “Uncle Rulon justifies all that assistance from the wicked government by explaining that really the money is coming from the Lord,” says DeLoy Bateman. “We’re taught that it’s the Lord’s way of manipulating the system to take care of his chosen people.” Fundamentalists call defrauding the government “bleeding the beast” and regard it as a virtuous act.

Say what you will of religion, but draw applicable conclusions and comparisons to reach a consensus. Religion = Reli = Prefix to Relic, or an ancient item. In days of old, items were novel, and they inspired devotion to the divine, and in the divine. Now, items are hypnotizing the masses into submission. Take Christ for example. When he broke bread in the Bible, people actually ate, it was useful to their bodies. Compare that to the politics, governments and corrupt, bumbling bureacrats and lobbyists in the economic recession of today. When they "broke bread", the economy nearly collapsed, and the benefactors thereof were only a select, decadent few. There was no bread to be had, so they asked the people for more! Breaking bread went from meaning sharing food and knowledge and wealth of mind and character, to meaning break the system, being libelous, being unaccountable, and robbing the earth. So they married people's paychecks to the land for high ransoms, rents and mortgages, effectively making any renter or landowner either a slave or a slave master once more. We have higher class toys to play with, and believe we are free. The difference is, the love of profit has the potential, and has nearly already enslaved all, it isn't restriced by culture anymore. Truth is not religion. Governments are religions. Truth does not encourage you to worship things. Governments are for profit. Truth is for progress. Governments are about process. When profit goes before progress, the latter suffers. The truest measurement of the quality of progress, will be its immediate and effective results without the aid of material profit. Quality is meticulous, it leaves no stone unturned, it is thorough and detail oriented. It takes its time, but the results are always worth the investment. Profit is quick, it is ruthless, it is unforgiving, it seeks to be first, but confuses being first with being the best, it is long scale suicidal, it is illusory, it is temporary, it is vastly unfulfilling. It breaks families, and it turns friends. It is single track minded, and small minded as well. Quality, would never do that, my friends. Ironic how dealing and concerning with money, some of those who make the most money, and break other's monies are the most unaccountable. People open bank accounts, over spend, and then expect to be held "unaccountable" for their actions. They even act innocent and unaccountable. But I tell you, everything can and will be counted, and accounted for. Peace can be had, but people must first annhilate the love of items, over their own kind.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

she feels lucky to have a job, but she is pretty blunt about what it is like to work at Walmart: she hates it. She’s worked at the local Walmart for nine years now, spending long hours on her feet waiting on customers and wrestling heavy merchandise around the store. But that’s not the part that galls her. Last year, management told the employees that they would get a significant raise. While driving to work or sorting laundry, Gina thought about how she could spend that extra money. Do some repairs around the house. Or set aside a few dollars in case of an emergency. Or help her sons, because “that’s what moms do.” And just before drifting off to sleep, she’d think about how she hadn’t had any new clothes in years. Maybe, just maybe. For weeks, she smiled at the notion. She thought about how Walmart was finally going to show some sign of respect for the work she and her coworkers did. She rolled the phrase over in her mind: “significant raise.” She imagined what that might mean. Maybe $2.00 more an hour? Or $2.50? That could add up to $80 a week, even $100. The thought was delicious. Then the day arrived when she received the letter informing her of the raise: 21 cents an hour. A whopping 21 cents. For a grand total of $1.68 a day, $8.40 a week. Gina described holding the letter and looking at it and feeling like it was “a spit in the face.” As she talked about the minuscule raise, her voice filled with anger. Anger, tinged with fear. Walmart could dump all over her, but she knew she would take it. She still needed this job. They could treat her like dirt, and she would still have to show up. And that’s exactly what they did. In 2015, Walmart made $14.69 billion in profits, and Walmart’s investors pocketed $10.4 billion from dividends and share repurchases—and Gina got 21 cents an hour more. This isn’t a story of shared sacrifice. It’s not a story about a company that is struggling to keep its doors open in tough times. This isn’t a small business that can’t afford generous raises. Just the opposite: this is a fabulously wealthy company making big bucks off the Ginas of the world. There are seven members of the Walton family, Walmart’s major shareholders, on the Forbes list of the country’s four hundred richest people, and together these seven Waltons have as much wealth as about 130 million other Americans. Seven people—not enough to fill the lineup of a softball team—and they have more money than 40 percent of our nation’s population put together. Walmart routinely squeezes its workers, not because it has to, but because it can. The idea that when the company does well, the employees do well, too, clearly doesn’t apply to giants like this one. Walmart is the largest employer in the country. More than a million and a half Americans are working to make this corporation among the most profitable in the world. Meanwhile, Gina points out that at her store, “almost all the young people are on food stamps.” And it’s not just her store. Across the country, Walmart pays such low wages that many of its employees rely on food stamps, rent assistance, Medicaid, and a mix of other government benefits, just to stay out of poverty. The

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17