Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, May 17, 2013.

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The calligrapher who penned the Constitution inscribed the words, “We the People,” in script many times larger than the surrounding text. This was no accident. It was intended to visually represent the relationship between government and its citizens, with the citizens standing superior.

Someone at some level yet-to-be-determined at the Internal Revenue Service either forgot or never knew this bit of history. So here is a thumbnail.

At the time the Constitution was adopted, citizen superiority over the government was not a new idea but it was rather new in actual practice. Our constitution traces its roots to the Magna Carta, forced upon King John of England in 1215. That document for the first time sought to limit the arbitrary exercise of power by the monarch. It was only minimally successful in doing so and it would take several more centuries for the idea of citizen self rule to truly take hold.

By 1787, having fought a bloody rebellion against the excesses of King George III, the founders of the United States were quite aware that unchecked power leads inevitably to unchecked abuse. Thomas Jefferson, one of the principal architects of the Constitution, is quite quotable on this subject. He said,

“Even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

All of this to say that fear and distrust of government are embodied in the very founding of the nation. The arguments at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were at many times bitter and contentious. Almost all of those arguments centered on the conflict inherent in giving government power sufficient to be effective without giving power sufficient to become oppressive.

Two years later in 1789, when the 1^st Congress of the United States met, there was strong belief among the constituencies of many members that such delicate balance had not yet been properly struck and that the power of the federal government was not yet sufficiently limited. From that conviction there emerged 12 proposed amendments to the Constitution. Eleven of those amendments would go on to be ratified, ten of which took their place in the document we now call the Bill of Rights.

Legislative, regulatory and judicial overreach in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries notwithstanding, the U.S. Constitution’s limits on government have been so successful in our 224 year history that it is now fashionable in some quarters to imagine that government need no longer be feared. As a result, talk of constitutional limits and warnings of the dangers of big government are now routinely dismissed by many on the left as reactionary right wing paranoia. For some time now, that characterization has appeared to be winning the day.

Then, as so often happens, events intervened.

In the past week we have learned that for several years the Internal Revenue Service has been using its fearsome powers as a means to harass, intimidate and thwart individuals and groups who espouse views in opposition to the current administration. In an instant, so-called right wing paranoia has been validated. Conservatives have been handed a clear and easily understood object lesson in support of the principle that as government grows, so grows the likelihood that it will spin out of control and eventually turn on its own citizens.

From this day forward, ‘IRS scandal’ will be useful shorthand for conservatives making their arguments against an ever-expanding government.

Again quoting Jefferson,

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

To that timeless quote I would add this corollary: The government that is big enough to give you everything you need is big enough to take from you everything you have, including the freedom to think and speak as you please.

Call that belief paranoia if you will, it is nonetheless not a clinical disorder. It is a condition precedent to the preservation of a free society.

I am not a conservative because I lack concern for poor people. I am not a conservative because I hate women, or because of malicious greed. I am not a conservative as a result of being a racist, a bigot or a homophobe.

I am a conservative because as a core principle, I distrust government. I believe that as government grows it becomes at once less competent and more malfeasant – a belief that has been again recently confirmed.

As an illustration of incompetence there is Benghazi, Libya, where the U.S. government failed to provide basic security for its own diplomatic personnel, even though those personnel all but begged. Four persons died and the administration has now been caught in multiple lies trying to hide its own dereliction.

As an illustration of malfeasance, we have the now admitted fact that the Internal Revenue Service has been systematically targeting individuals and groups who hold political views in opposition to the current administration. There is no more feared government agency than the IRS. For it to abuse its power against political opponents of the sitting administration evokes recollections of Soviet Russia.

I am a conservative because I believe that the bigger government gets, the harder it becomes for its citizens to keep it within its lawful bounds. Thomas Paine was right when he said, “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, May 10, 2013.

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Author Kevin Williamson has a new book that I’d like to recommend. It’s called, “The End is Near and It’s Going to be Awesome – How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier and More Secure.”

The premise of the book is that when behemoths such as Social Security, Medicare, the postal service and Amtrak at last collapse, we will not as a nation suddenly be unable to provide medical care and retirement for our seniors, we will not be without the means to deliver a letter or a parcel from place-to-place and we will not suddenly be frozen in situ by a lack of transportation.

Instead, the very collapse of these unsustainable politically-enabled programs will clear the way for their replacements to spontaneously emerge.

Among the things he uses to support his thesis, Williamson cites the 1958 essay “I, Pencil,” by Leonard Read. I was introduced to “I, Pencil,” years ago and was glad to be reminded of it. As politicians wrestle with the unsustainability of Social Security, Medicare and now, Obamacare, it’s worth revisiting I, Pencil.

In Read’s essay, he posits that no one knows how to make a pencil. Yet not only do pencils get made, they get made by the millions at a price that makes them disposable.

A pencil is simplicity itself. There is not a single moving part. Yet no single person – and no centrally-located group of persons – knows from start to finish how a pencil is made. There is simply no way to understand and control, from end-to-end, the forestry, mining, metallurgy, chemistry, tooling, transportation, logistics and other areas of expertise that go into pencil making.

The CEO of Faber-Castell, the largest manufacturer of the ubiquitous No. 2 pencil, cannot possibly corral under his direct control the diverse expertise necessary for the manufacture of his product, nor would he try.

He instead is able to rely on a concept called dispersed knowledge. As it pertains to pencil-making, the guy in the sawmill in Oregon where the cedar is cut has no knowledge of, let alone the expertise of, the guy in Ceylon, who is mining the graphite for the lead. But to succeed in their respective roles in the manufacture of pencils, neither needs to. Such is the magic of dispersed knowledge.

And such is the reason that grocery store shelves are always full and the things of daily life that we rely upon and take for granted are always at hand.

An understanding of dispersed knowledge brings us face-to-face with the futility of trying to centralize solutions to complex problems – such as those ostensibly addressed by Social Security, Medicare and now Obamacare.

Social Security and Medicare were each conceived by vote-seeking politicians as answers to the problems attendant to growing old. After decades of placing ever-increasing demands upon the taxpayers that are forced to support them, both programs are bankrupt. There is no way to make any plausible argument that the same won’t happen with Obamacare.

The very existence of these programs – and the fact that participation in them is enforced by the threat of imprisonment if one doesn’t – crowds out potentially better solutions to the very problems they are intended to address.

If you centralized pencil making on Capitol Hill, pencils would be of one-tenth the quality at ten times the price – and the only way people would buy them is if the government used its police powers to force them to.

That is precisely where we now find ourselves, not with something as simple as a pencil, but with the overwhelming complexities attendant to the health care and inevitable old age of more than 300 million people.

Thus, according to Kevin Williamson’s book, we await the coming collapse of these top-down institutions born of politics, to see them replaced by the innovative bottom-up forces born of opportunity – the same forces that gave us antibiotics, air conditioning, the personal computer and the iPhone.

That’s a hopeful future.

News is in the eye of the beholder and apparently only a very small percentage of Americans behold this as a news story.

But I do.

Tomorrow, Gregory Hicks, the former number two man at the American embassy in Libya, is scheduled to testify before Congress. The topic: the attacks of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans, including American Ambassador Christopher Stevens, dead.

It is widely expected that Hick’s testimony will serve to reveal that with respect to what actually happened versus what we were told, White House press secretary Jay Carney lied to the media, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied to Congress and President Obama lied to the American people.

It’s now clear that coming as it did one week after the Democratic National Convention at which the president all but declared al Qaeda terrorism a thing of the past, the Benghazi attack was politically inconvenient and was thus downplayed. When pressed on this point in her testimony before Congress, Hillary Clinton said that at this point, months after the fact, “What difference does it make?”

If the issue is narrowed to the attacks themselves, perhaps not much. But the issue is not so narrow. This issue is that the administration lied to the American people for political gain. The last president to do that was hounded from office by an indignant media. His name was Richard Nixon. Will there be similar indignation this time?

Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, May 3, 2013.

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On Tuesday, Apr. 30, President Obama held his first open press conference in more than two months and the usually tame press corps gave the president a harder time than usual. One line of questioning revealed what will likely be a recurring source of heartburn for the president between now and the end of his term.

The president called on NBC’s Chuck Todd who stood up and said that retiring six-term Democratic senator Max Baucus of Montana, who carried much of the water in passing Obamacare, is on record as saying that the implementation of Obamacare is a “train wreck.” Todd asked why Sen. Baucus would say such a thing and how the president would respond.

And thus the reality of Obamcare in its implementation begins to replace the abstraction of Obamacare as it was being forced through Congress on a 100 percent pure party-line vote.

Baucus’s ‘train wreck’ metaphor is apt. There are huge problems with Obamacare that millions of average Americans will begin to feel very acutely and very soon.

Examples include:

1. A University of Chicago study says that half of all current individual plans do not meet the minimum coverage standards under the Affordable Care Act. That means that individuals covered by such plans will have to go shopping. They will find that the market for Affordable Care Act-compliant coverage will have them paying up to half again more than what they are currently paying.
2. As we have said in this space previously, not paying the bill isn’t the same as controlling costs. Yet under the Affordable Care Act, that is precisely what happens to Medicare reimbursements. One of the funding mechanisms of the law is the reductions in payments to doctors, hospitals and other providers. According to the Medicare program’s own actuary, as many as 15 percent of current providers will stop taking Medicare patients as a result. Seniors that depend on Medicare will simply have to wait to see the doctor.
3. Millions of small businesses are looking for every way possible to get below the 50 employee threshold at which Obamacare mandates kick in. Employers with fewer than 50 employees are specifically limiting growth plans so as to avoid exceeding that threshold. Since the law’s passage in 2010, this provision of Obamacare has been a significant (but by no means exclusive) factor in sluggish job growth.
4. At the end of all of this, according to the Congressional Budget Office, an estimated 30 million people will remain without health insurance – the very problem that Obamacare first set out to fix.

Democrats in both the House and the Senate are beginning to hear from constituents and what they are hearing is not, ‘Thank you for voting for Obamacare.’ This is a problem for Democrats, particularly those elected from districts and states that went for Romney in 2012. Unlike any other piece of major legislation in American history, the Democrats own Obamacare 100 percent. There is not a single Republican vulnerable to voter reprisal for helping enact the Affordable Care Act. To the extent that Americans are unhappy with Obamacare, Democrats shoulder all of the blame.

So keenly aware of this fact is Senator Max Baucus that rather than face voters in his state of Montana that went decisively for Romney in 2012, he is retiring at the end of his term in 2014.

Several other senators find themselves in similarly uncomfortable positions.

The enactment of Obamacare is the single biggest accomplishment of the Obama administration. That accomplishment is looking more and more like a first term victory that will haunt the president relentlessly in his second term.

Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, April 27, 2013.

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On Thursday, President Obama and four former presidents stood on the stage in Dallas on the occasion of the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the campus of SMU. The dedication of the Bush library has set me thinking about the Bush years and affords the opportunity to offer some personal reflection.

Full disclosure. President Bush and I attend the same church. In the years before he left to be governor, we would spend a few moments with one another on most Sunday mornings. I am not, by any stretch, a Bush family insider. But he did give me a special code word to put on envelopes that marked them as personal mail. Over eight years, I wrote him letters – mostly as an act of support – and he graciously answered.

The thing that always comes uppermost to my mind is that during his eight years, I constantly wished that the American people could meet the guy that I talked to at church and who penned the hand-written answers to my letters.

George W. Bush is one of the most genuinely personable men I know. Not politician personable — in this line of work you can spot those guys from a mile off. I’m talking warmly, genuinely personable – an affable guy with a sparkling sense of humor.

That guy at church was at ease and conversant. Without doubt his biggest weakness as president was the fact that little of that came through when he was behind the lectern. Speechmaking is George W. Bush’s Achilles Heel. On a good day President Bush would get through a speech in journeyman fashion. On too many occasions, he made the jobs of the writers at Saturday Night Live all too easy.

I cannot prove but will always believe that every important decision during his presidency – from the invasion of Iraq to the “surge” to the TARP bailout — was made because George W. Bush believed, ahead of any political calculus, that it was the right thing to do. He often suffered withering, many times grotesquely unfair criticism. My criticism of him is that he was too slow to answer those critics. His desire to stay out of the mud too often allowed those down in the mud to define him.

Despite those who glibly call him a dunce, George W. Bush is no such thing. He knew he was taking huge political risk going into Iraq and he did it anyway – because, whatever the ultimate verdict, he at the time thought it was the right thing to do. That takes the kind of courage we guys like to describe in male anatomical terms – something in short supply among today’s politicians.

Since President Obama was on hand for the library dedication, a little comparison seems inevitable. The comparison rather favors President Bush.

For the abysmally low approval ratings that President Bush had when leaving office, four and a half years on, the approval ratings enjoyed by Presidents Bush and Obama stand virtually tied.

When President Bush left office the ratio of national debt to Gross Domestic Product stood at what seems today a sedate 38 percent. That number has since doubled to 76 percent.

While the costs of Obamacare continue to escalate, Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit passed under President Bush, is costing taxpayers 35 percent less than forecast – making it the only federal entitlement ever to cost less than predicted.

Save for the brief mild recession following 9/11 during Bush’s term and the 2010 bounce back from the horrendous numbers of 2009 during Obama’s term, both of which are aberrations, the best year of economic growth under President Obama is not as good as the worst year under President Bush.

And, since taking office, and despite hot campaign rhetoric to the contrary, President Obama has left in place most of the mechanisms created by President Bush to combat terror.

True to his character, President Bush has very graciously chosen to keep his opinions to himself since leaving office. If he were to choose otherwise, there is plenty he could say.

I would love to hear that guy in church just out and say it.

Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, April 19, 2013.

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Emotions are running high following the Senate defeat Wednesday (04/17)  of legislation that would have expanded background checks for gun purchases and limited the sale of some military-style rifles. The president was visibly angry. Vice President Biden actually wiped away tears.

The key word is “emotion.” Since the horror of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, proponents of strict gun control laws have been appealing to raw emotion at the expense of logic and common sense.

The president has staged public events flanked by parents of dead Sandy Hook students and even turned his weekly radio address microphone over to Francine Wheeler, the mother of a six-year old who died at Sandy Hook.

The pain on the faces of those parents is real and it is soul wrenching. But putting that pain on display doesn’t offer even the tiniest scrap of evidence that the rejected Senate bill would have prevented, or even mitigated, the horror of Sandy Hook — such being the minimum test necessary to pass laws restricting the freedoms of law-abiding citizens.

On the books already are laws against murder, burglary and sexual assault. Yet every day there are murders, burglaries and sexual assaults. Those inclined to commit such crimes are not much deterred by even the most tightly-worded statutes.

Why, then, would we expect that someone so deranged as to go shoot first graders would somehow be magically deterred by new statutes regarding the buying and selling of guns?

Whatever the emotional appeal of expanded background checks or limits on magazine capacity, arguing that either would reduce gun violence is wrong at best and sophistic at worst. There will always be an element of society that has no intention of submitting to a background check or indeed abiding by any law.

Neither will they surrender their high-capacity magazines. Restrict the sale of 15-round clips and all you will accomplish is to create a thriving criminal black market for the millions of such clips already in circulation.

Not that a high-capacity magazine is even required for carrying out mass murder. Eric Harris carried several small-capacity magazines and simply swapped them out when he and a partner shot up Columbine High School in 1999. Seung-Hui Cho did the same thing when he killed 32 at Virginia Tech University in 2007.

I could go on.

But there’s something else about President Obama’s use of grieving parents in his campaign to pass gun legislation. I can’t help my belief that putting the raw emotion of parental grief on display is less about supporting the president’s position than it is about delegitimizing his opposition.

The president is using the stark images of agonizing mothers and fathers to his purpose of transforming legitimate debate concerning gun ownership, self-defense and second amendment freedoms into a simplistic up or down vote on gun violence.

If you support the president’s position, you are, ipso facto, a decent, caring, empathetic person who opposes violence. If, however, you disagree with the president, your opposition is not principled objection to the limiting of freedom with no offsetting benefit to public safety. You are, instead, a de facto supporter of gun violence, lacking even sufficient humanity to grieve the loss of innocent children.

It’s cynical, brazenly political and unworthy of a leader. But it is potentially very effective if the goal is to keep emotions running high – something the president will have to do if he is to get the kind of legislation he would be unlikely to get if he had to rely solely on facts and rational argument.

Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, April 12, 2013.

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More than two months late, the president has at last complied with the law and submitted a budget. It is, as we have come to expect, an ideological document that is untethered entirely from actual governing.

The submission comes on the heels of the sequester and the president’s Chicken Little road show last month during which he predicted unbearable hardship and severe economic stress arising from a forced two percentage point reduction in the rate of growth of federal spending (not actual reduction in spending, mind you, just a reduction in the rate at which federal spending grows).

With the country now close to $17 trillion in debt and with annual federal deficits of a trillion dollars now the norm for as far out into the future as the eye can see the president’s lack of leadership on the nation’s fiscal situation is beyond appalling.

The massive federal debt incurred during World War II was financed by America’s own citizens purchasing savings bonds that paid a respectable rate of interest and acted as a savings program for millions of families. Today’s debt is being financed with bonds that pay essentially nothing and that are funded with money conjured out of thin air by the Federal Reserve.

That the president is derelict in his duty with respect to his stewardship of the country’s financial health is beyond question. No president in our history has run up debt with such reckless disregard. No corporate CEO could hope to keep his job with such a record. The failure of the president’s financial stewardship is beyond debate.

What is debatable, however is, ‘why?’

Why does the president behave with such utter disregard for what any reasonable person would recognize as a severe threat to our long-term strength and perhaps to our very sovereignty?

I keep trying to puzzle it out and only two possibilities come to mind. Either he doesn’t understand or he doesn’t care.

Lacking any way to know for certain, my money is on the latter. I just don’t think he cares.

I don’t think Barack Obama cares what kind of shape he leaves the country in at the end of his term so long as he gets to indulge his ideology and live well in the process.

That he is living well is also beyond question.

I offer one recent episode as  illustration.

Last week, the president put on a show of solidarity with federal workers who have been furloughed as a result of sequester budget cuts. He announced that he is returning five percent of his presidential salary to the Treasury. For those of you who might have said, ‘Aw, isnt’ that nice,’ let’s put this insulting gesture in perspective.

The president made this announcement soon after having flown to Florida for a President’s Day weekend vacation that included golf with Tiger Woods.

The president is paid a salary of $400,000 a year. Five percent is $20,000.

It costs about $186,000 per hour to operate Air Force One. The round trip from Washington to Florida is about six hours give or take. The president’s salary reduction, therefore, paid for about six and a half minutes – less than two percent – of the cost of one presidential golf outing.

The president’s family has, in just the past month, been in the tropics enjoying the sun and in the mountains enjoying the slopes. That some of the costs of these first family vacations are born by the Obama family personally does not mitigate the fact that we beleaguered taxpayers are having to pay millions per trip for government transportation and security.

While the country’s financial health continues to deteriorate, the Obamas have set up what amounts to “Versailles on the Potomac” where they live a Sybaritic life with utter disregard for what is happening outside the palace and how it is affecting those of us that must pay for it.

All while the president steadfastly refuses to govern.

Which brings me to the second thing that I’m having trouble puzzling out.

Why do we continue to let this go on?

Listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM 600, Friday, March 22, 2013.

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Your state senators and representatives are currently in Austin cooking something up that I think we should carefully think about. There is a proposed amendment to the Texas constitution floating around that, if approved by voters, would not only permit casino gambling in Texas, would serve to make the State of Texas the dealer.

That’s because the measure wouldn’t simply make it legal to set up a casino. I might could support that idea, particularly if it were a local option. But that’s not the proposal. Instead, the measure would, according to its language, create “immediate additional revenue” by “…creating the Texas Gaming Commission, and authorizing and regulating the operation of casino games and slot machines by a limited number of licensed operators and certain Indian tribes.”

In other words, put the State of Texas in the position of creating a casino gambling cartel and then profiting from people who shovel the rent money down a slot machine.

I’m not moralizing here. I’m not arguing against gambling per se. I’m enough of a libertarian to say that if you want to piss away your paycheck at the blackjack table, it’s your business. But I don’t think the state should be in the position of hoping that you do. What’s legal isn’t necessarily right. (And it should be noted that I defend gambling as a matter of your business only with the caveat that how you pay for food, shelter, clothing and transportation when the money is gone is also your business.)

As an argument in favor of casino gambling, proponents point to the economic and tax revenue impact of Texans leaving the state to visit casinos in Louisiana and Oklahoma. Better to keep that revenue in the state they say.

But by that argument, you could make the case for the state getting into the prostitution business. States, in my opinion, waste time and money trying, with little success, to stamp prostitution out. The argument could be made that since prostitution is going to happen anyway, the state should form a State Prostitution Commission that would license, regulate and tax the sex-for-hire industry.

I believe that would be wrong for two reasons.

First, my inner libertarian again speaks up. If two parties agree to have sex, it’s none of the state’s business. Whether or not money changes hands is incidental. But that will never make prostitution honorable.

And thus my second argument. It is fundamentally wrong for the state to have a financial interest in you hiring a hooker. Prostitution is not like the responsible consumption of alcohol. Prostitution in any amount is depraved. It is the worst sort of misogyny. Its practitioners almost to a person lead lives riddled by physical and psychological injury. That they choose to do so is their business. But the state should have no truck with it.

Which leads to my argument against the current proposal for casino gambling. By the simple economic fundamentals of a casino, in order for the casino to make money, the player has to lose money. Just as the state shouldn’t hope that anyone would go hire a hooker, it shouldn’t hope that anyone lose money. Some people can afford to lose money. Most can’t.

As for the tax revenue justification: whatever tax revenue a government generates it spends. The country’s current fiscal situation absolutely screams in support of the idea that rather than look for new sources of revenue, government at every level should be looking for ways to need less of it. Feeding the beast only makes him bigger and stronger. Our only hope for economic survival is to starve him.

The state being de facto in the casino business is a bad idea. If the idea survives the legislative session, let’s hope it dies at the ballot box.

The editors of National Review Online have posted a piece that runs to 1,388 words detailing – not with rhetoric and philosophical argument but with hard data – the many shortcomings and broken promises of Obamacare.

We don’t have time for 1,388 words here so a detailed, fact-supported argument against the mockingly-named Affordable Care Act is not possible. A summary will have to do.

Here it is.

The Congressional Budget Office has revised the cost estimate of Obamacare upward, by close to 100 percent. So much for not adding a dime to the deficit as President Obama promised. The president promised that the typical family would see the cost of health insurance premiums go down by an average of $2,500 per year. Premiums here at my company went up by 16 percent this year and are expected by some estimates to rise by as much as 50 percent in 2014.

At the end of all of this, 30 million Americans will remain without health insurance, essentially unchanged from before the law was passed.

Obamacare is deeply flawed, expensive and unaffordable. Republicans and Democrats unblinded by partisan ideology should begin working on a replacement before We the People show up with tar, feathers and pitchforks. We the People should make it clear that that’s exactly what will happen if they don’t.