Voice For Liberty in Wichita

ARRA News Service reports on a Zogby poll and links to a video that illustrate the poor job the national news media did covering the recent presidential campaign. The video is interesting although a little repetitive. The poll results are something else, though. Zogby found that 86.9% thought that Sarah Palin said that she could [...]

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A Wichita Eagle story (Development speaker touts power of cash) reports on an economic incentive expert’s evaluation of our state’s effort.
(It’s revealing to learn that an accounting firm has someone with the title “regional leader of credits and incentives,” whose duty, evidently, it is to help companies figure out which state’s incentives are most valuable. [...]

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My friend Leslie Carbone has endorsed Chuck Baldwin for president. I’d been decided on Bob Barr for some time, but Leslie’s got me thinking.

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By Alan Cobb, Americans For Prosperity — Kansas. From The Topeka Capital-Journal, Saturday, November 01, 2008
On Oct. 1, Congress did nothing. And we at Americans for Prosperity — Kansas applaud it. By not acting to renew it, lawmakers allowed the ban on offshore drilling and oil shale recovery to expire.
This first step, albeit a baby [...]

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“Soon this depressing campaign will be over, and we can reflect on what we learned from our two-month introduction to Sarah Palin. Clearly, it is more than we would have ever wished to know about ourselves.”
“First, there turns out to be no standard of objectivity in contemporary journalism. … Second, there does not seem to [...]

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Be sure to view all four parts. It’s very good. Click here for part one.

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I am one of these people!
Amidst Market Unrest, Americans for Prosperity Gathers Citizens to Protest Big-Government Power Grab
WASHINGTON – About 1,000 citizens will gather in front of the U.S. Capitol on Friday to participate in a free-market call to arms by the grassroots group Americans for Prosperity (AFP). Amidst market uncertainty, and just weeks away [...]

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My friend Leslie Carbone was Booted from White House Conference Call.
By the way, Leslie is the author of Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform, which will be published in May 2009. I can’t wait.

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There won’t be a Kansas blog roundup today. I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona attending the State Policy Network conference. We’ve been busy from dawn to way late at night, and there just hasn’t been time.

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From my friend Karl Peterjohn.
16 June 2008
Mr. Anthony Kennedy
US Supreme Court
1 First St., NE
Washington, DC 20543
Dear Sir:
I am writing concerning your most recent decision empowering terrorists captured on the battlefield in the U.S. court system. This edict granting habeas corpus rights to Islamic Jihadists will stain you and your four left wing activist colleagues as [...]

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A Wall Street Journal editorial from March 18, 2008 (Patriot Tanker Games) argued that calls for calls on Capitol Hill for “patriotism” in defense procurement are misguided. Leaders of this call include Kansas’s very own Todd Tiahrt and Pat Roberts.

These politicians say that allowing an important American defense system to be built in partnership with a European firm is dangerous for America. In testimony to the defense appropriations subcommittee Rep. Tiahrt stated “I am outraged by this decision to outsource our national security … We are stacking the deck against American manufacturers, at the expense of our national and economic security.”

But the Journal editorial sees clearly through the haze: “What’s really going on is a familiar scrum for federal cash, with politicians from Washington and Kansas using nationalism as cover for their pork-barreling … The modern aerospace biz is an increasingly global affair, and more than half of the Northrop/EADS tanker (by value) will be made in America. Much of Boeing’s tanker would also have been built outside the U.S.”

If the tankers are built by Boeing that means more jobs for Wichita, which Tiahrt represents. Bringing home jobs and pork, it seems, are one of a United States Congressman’s most important jobs. But as the Journal editorial points out, the Defense Department has broader responsibilities: to American taxpayers across the country, and to American soldiers. If the Pentagon believes the Northrop/EADS tanker proposal is best for American security and taxpayers, on what basis can Todd Tiahrt, Pat Roberts and the rest of the Kansas congressional delegation object?

Every congressman and senator wants to do for their district or state what Tiahrt and Roberts are doing for Wichita and Kansas. This desire leads to never-ending battles for a share of federal spending. Spending is often allocated based on political considerations instead of reason.

The Journal editorial is absolutely correct when it concludes that “Protectionists in Congress want to make America’s soldiers wait even longer for this new equipment, all to score political points at home. There’s a word for that, but it’s not patriotism.”

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Kimberly A. Strassel of the Wall Street Journal explains a mess of John McCain’s own making, and which confirms to me that he is not suited to be President of the United States: McCain’s Campaign Finance Revelation.

“The Arizonan may not yet fully understand that money is speech.” writes Ms. Strassel.

As Thomas Sowell recently said: “Senator John McCain could never convince me to vote for him. Only Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can cause me to vote for McCain.”

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In a letter printed in the February 22, 2008 Wichita Eagle, Sedgwick County Commission Chairman Tom Winters, along with Wichita State University President Don Beggs, praised some Kansas congressmen for being “very effective Washington advocates for south-central Kansas.” What the congressmen — Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, and Kansas Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts — did was to “roll up their sleeves and work on many issues that help improve our quality of life in the Wichita area.” Sounds like a noble cause, doesn’t it?

What the three congressmen did was to secure federal funding for several projects deemed important to Chairman Winters and President Beggs. In other words, they brought home the pork to Wichita in the form of earmarks. This is why efforts to reform earmarks and pork barrel spending have failed and are likely to continue to fail. Evidence of this is Tom Winters, as I believe that he would describe himself as fiscally conservative, yet he praises his congressmen when they bring home the pork.

Rep. Todd Tiahrt recently sent me a newsletter by email titled “It’s Time to End Wasteful Spending.” It told me of his goal “to find and create solutions that will benefit Kansas taxpayers.” He’s done just that, according to the letter from Winters and Beggs, and in the past too.

In 2004 the Wichita Business Journal reported on two projects where Rep. Tiahrt brought home funding to his district. One was a computer-aided dispatch system for Sedgwick County’s 911 system. The other was a grant to the Wichita Art Museum. Neither recipient of the earmarks, the director of Sedgwick County’s Emergency Communications Department and the director of the Wichita Art Museum, thought the spending qualified as pork. Most pork recipients feel the same.

Then there’s Tiahrt’s earmark for the BTK investigation. As reported in Human Events: “Tiahrt, according to ‘The Almanac of American Politics,’ has bragged that one of the ‘top 10 most gratifying things I’ve done’ is securing $1 million in an omnibus appropriations bill for the Wichita Police Department to investigate the ‘BTK’ killer.”

That’s the way it usually is. The recipients of the earmarked pork barrel spending believe the need is urgent, the cause worthy, and a federal earmark is justified. It seems that everyone across the country believes this about their own pet projects.

To Rep. Tiahrt’s credit, he has voted for earmark reform measures. But his behavior and that of our two senators, Roberts and Brownback, is to continue to bring home earmarks and pork for the good of the folks back home.

And who can blame them, really? After all, we pay taxes to the federal government. Shouldn’t we get something back? Even Ron Paul gets earmarks for his congressional district. Should Rep. Tiahrt turn down earmarks, his political opponents would have his hide for failing to look out for the needs of his district.

But with these attitudes, earmark reform will never succeed, and pork barrel politics will never end.

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By John Todd.

The people know much better how to spend their money than the government. — Ron Paul

The economic prosperity and the freedom that people of this country enjoy today were a result of low taxes combined with little or no regulations dating back to the founding. People were free to use the fruits of their labor and their property as they wished, and through this freedom they created the most prosperous country in the world with the greatest amount of individual freedom. Today, Ron Paul is the only candidate for president who understands the dangers to our economic prosperity and freedom that has resulted as people have learned to vote themselves money from the government treasury and how to take other peoples property through government regulations. The result has been high taxes and regulations that threaten our prosperity and freedom, and we must stop this slide.

Ron Paul says, “too many politicians and lobbyists are spending America into ruin. We are nine trillion dollars in debt as a nation. Our mounting government debt endangers the financial future of our children and grandchildren. If we don’t cut spending now, higher taxes and economic disaster will be in their future — and yours.”

How does this impact Kansas? The per capita share of the national debt is around $30,000 per Kansan or $120,000 for a Kansas family of four! Our own state budget has grown to nearly $13 billion. Six billion of the $13 billion that comes from state general funds with all source funds accounting for the balance. A large portion of the “all source” funds come from the Federal Government. What we as a people have allowed is for the Federal Government to overtax us, and then place our state in a position to compete with 49 other states to recover our own money. And when the money comes back to Kansas, it has “strings” attached on how the money can be spent, thus allowing non-elected federal bureaucrats in Washington to control us through their imposed regulations. What does this do to state sovereignty? We need to stop this abuse, and Ron Paul is the only candidate for president who is willing to do it! Ron Paul says, “The Constitution was written to restrain the government, never to restrain the people.”

Ron Paul is clearly the only presidential candidate, who understands individual liberty vs. the collectivism that permeates our country, private property rights that restrict governments ability to give our house, business, or farm to the politically well-connected, free market capitalism, and the need for limited government that eliminates the onerous overburdening regulation that stifles our businesses, our personal lives, and our freedom.

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A common theme of the various candidates for the Republican Party nomination for the Presidency of the United States is Ronald Reagan. Candidates compete with each other to be the true heir of Reagan and his legacy.

Ron Paul, however, looks back to an even earlier time in American politics when the word “conservative” had a different meaning.

Most Republican candidates favor a muscular American foreign policy advocated by the neo-conservatives who advise our current president. This is a far cry from the foreign policy our nation once had.

What do World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, and our presence in Kosovo have in common? These wars or police actions were all started by big-government Democrats and opposed by conservatives. I don’t think that any of the current crop of Republican candidates would agree that these wars — by any stretch of the imagination — might have been unnecessary. Instead, these men argue at debates about who supported the surge in Iraq first and strongest.

Ron Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy is simply the policy that our party once had. Non-interventionist does not mean isolationist. It does not mean that we cower at home and hope that no one notices us and attacks us. Instead, it means that we honestly assess threats against us, and respond to those that are real. This is why Ron Paul was in favor of the efforts in Afghanistan to remove the Taliban, but against the war in Iraq. And we now know that the case for war in Iraq was fabricated largely from falsehoods.

With regard to economic policy, most of the current Republican candidates admire Ronald Reagan because he cut taxes. That was the easy part. The more difficult thing to do, what Reagan couldn’t accomplish, is to drastically cut spending by government. This is something Ron Paul believes in and will do.

As in foreign affairs, Ron Paul believes in an economic policy that is non-interventionist. You may be asking “Doesn’t someone need to manage the economy?” Well, there is someone managing — or at least attempting to manage — a large part of the economy: the Federal Reserve System. It is that system, though its policy of low interest rates, that is most directly responsible for the sub-prime mortgage crises we are now facing. Hundreds of billions have been lost in market value of securities and homes, and tens of thousands of families have lost their very homes. It is now believed that this crisis is leading our country into recession, and cries for even more intervention into and management of the economy are heard across the land, even from Republican presidential candidates.

It is economic interventionism itself that harms the economy. The Federal Reserve System, which creates money from nothing with its printing presses and open market operations, creates the inflation — with its accompanying uncertainty — that harms our economy and prosperity.

Further, the Federal Reserve System and its policy of inflationary money and credit creation provides extra income for government to spend without having to tax. That is quite lucrative, as printing hundred dollar bills is inexpensive, and creating money in computerized ledger entries costs even less. Even worse, he who prints the money gets to spend it first, before its value is diluted by inflation.

Among Republican candidates, only Ron Paul recognizes this. Only Ron Paul calls for an end to the Federal Reserve System and its monopoly on the creation of money out of thin air.

Non-interventionism in foreign affairs, non-interventionism in domestic economic policy — non-interventionism is a theme with Ron Paul.

How so? In other ways:

Stop government intervention in private property, through the taking of property from one party and giving it to another, more politically favored party through the process of eminent domain.

Stop government intervention into the environment. Today, it seems as if environmental policy is written by those who are enemies to capitalism — the “watermelons” — green on the outside but red in the center. Instead, Ron Paul promotes reliance on property rights and markets to solve environmental problems.

Stop ever-increasing government interventionism into education. Ron Paul supports freedom for parents to choose where and how to educate their children. That freedom should be backed up by tax credits, so that the freedom is a real choice that parents can exercise.

Stop government intervention in the types of drugs people may use. The unwise war on drugs has created criminal gang empires that affect us all, as we have witnessed here in Wichita recently. The government response is more law enforcement, which only makes the drug trade more profitable and increases the violence on our streets.

These policies of non-intervention that Ron Paul believes in may seem strange and incredible to some of you. That they may, however, is only an indication of how far we have strayed from the vision of freedom and liberty that this country was founded upon.

If you believe in freedom, if you believe in liberty, if you believe that “we the people” can solve problems without the heavy-hand of government interventionism, you should cast your ballot for Ron Paul.

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Writing in the July 8, 2007 Washington Post, George Will has a column titled “Declaration of Dependence.” The link to it is here, although you may have to register (for free) to read it.

All through my public school education, we were taught that Franklin Roosevelt was godlike for saving the country from the Great Depression. While I don’t directly know what schoolchildren are taught today, I imagine that the stature of Roosevelt has only increased, as his vision of large, overpowering government is in perfect alignment with the goals of public schools. This is more that I need to unlearn.

Some excerpts:

Some mornings during the autumn of 1933, when the unemployment rate was 22 percent, the president, before getting into his wheelchair, sat in bed, surrounded by economic advisers, setting the price of gold. One morning he said he might raise it 21 cents: “It’s a lucky number because it’s three times seven.” His Treasury secretary wrote that if people knew how gold was priced “they would be frightened.” … In his second inaugural address, Roosevelt sought “unimagined power” to enforce the “proper subordination” of private power to public power. He got it … Roosevelt, however, made interest-group politics systematic and routine. New Deal policies were calculated to create many constituencies — labor, retirees, farmers, union members — to be dependent on government. … Before Roosevelt, the federal government was unimpressive relative to the private sector.

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At the end of March 2007, President Bush raised taxes on Americans. How so? He did it by applying tariffs to imports of paper from China.

The measure is supposed to help Americans, but all it does is hurt us. Donald J. Boudreaux’s column Paper Chase from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review explains how this happens. A portion follows:

The Bush administration recently raised Americans’ taxes.

If you missed this item in the news, it’s because this tax hike isn’t described forthrightly by government nor is it reported forthrightly by the media. The tax hike I’m talking about is the higher tariff on paper products imported from China.

“Tariff” is simply another word for “excise tax” — here, a levy imposed by government on each unit of some class of products bought domestically.

Descriptions of higher tariffs, though, almost always focus on foreigners — such as a headline in this very paper on March 31: “U.S. to slap trade tariff on China.” But a more accurate headline would have read “U.S. to slap higher taxes on Americans buying paper from China.”

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Writing from Little Rock, Arkansas

A recent USA Today editorial (”Hooked on Handouts” July 31, 2006) makes the case for reforming corporate welfare, given the success of “regular” welfare reform:

Most of what the government does could be called welfare, using a very broad definition of the word. It’s not hard to find individuals, corporations, states or communities hooked on one Washington handout or another. The result of this largesse is a society that is unproductively dependent on government support — and politically organized to keep it coming.

Agriculture is a leading example. Supports have become a sad hoax on the U.S. taxpayer. According to a recent report by The Washington Post, the government has handed out $1.3 billion since 2000 to people who don’t even farm. It has sent billions of dollars in drought relief to areas where there was no drought. And, oh yes, it has paid out a staggering $144 billion over 10 years, according to the National Taxpayers Union, 72% of which went to the 10% of farmers with the largest holdings. Such spending is an insult to hardworking, unsubsidized, Americans. Wasteful farm programs should be cut.

The federal budget is replete with hundreds of payments to, and tax benefits for, other politically potent industries. This “corporate welfare” ranges from government-funded logging roads to subsidies for electric utilities. Last year, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, Congress earmarked 15,877 items worth $47.4 billion to specific recipients, many of them companies with well-connected Washington lobbyists.

This not only squanders taxpayers’ money, it also clogs decision-making in the private sector. Rather than making a smart business decision promptly, companies wait to see whether they can make more by delaying and doing something that could be less sensible.

With so much available in the form of government handouts, it is no wonder companies spend billions on lobbying, and that there are scandals.

F.A. Hayek wrote in his book The Road to Serfdom: “As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power.” Lobbying scandals are a symptom and manifestation of a government that has too much power and spends too much time rewarding one person at the expense of another.

Is there a solution? Can we persuade the rewarded class to give up their spoils? The economist Walter E. Williams relates this story and solution: “Nearly two decades ago, during dinner with the late Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, I asked him if he had the power to write one law that would get government out of our lives, what would that law be? Professor Hayek replied he’d write a law that read: Whatever Congress does for one American it must do for all Americans.”

It could be that simple.

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Congressman Todd Tiahrt has secured $1 million for use by the Wichita Police Department in the omnibus appropriations bill that goes before the House of Representatives on Monday.

The bill has already passed the Senate, Tiahrt spokesman Chuck Knapp said, and approval by the House is expected to be a formality.

While there are safeguards in place to make sure the money is used for certain purposes, Knapp said, “we’re just not able to comment on the details of the funding.” — From “BTK ‘clues’ breed theories” in The Wichita Eagle, December 2, 2004.

Here The Wichita Eagle reports that U.S. Representative Todd Tiahrt secured one million dollars from the federal government to help pay for costs related to the investigation of the BTK serial killer. Rep. Tiahrt was widely praised for this.

We should remember where that money came from. It didn’t fall out of the sky. It wasn’t free. It came from the taxpayers of the entire country. I suspect that many people in Wichita thought it was good that we got the nation as a whole to pay for the BTK investigation.

But think about what had to happen behind the scenes. Rep. Tiahrt must have lobbied for the money. Then the federal government collected tax money, only to send it back to Wichita. That, right there, is inefficient. A bureaucracy had to exist to perform that.

Then, of course, Rep. Tiahrt and Wichita aren’t the only ones looking for a federal handout. When other cities or states receive money in this way — a special payment to one locality for a special project — we in Wichita call it pork barrel spending. That’s exactly what Rep. Tiahrt engaged in to get us the money for BTK. He should be ashamed, and we should not laud him for it.

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This is what I haven’t seen mentioned in the debate over the future of social security.

Opponents of private accounts cite the risk inherent in investing in markets. Instead, they will rely on future generations of workers to pay the taxes necessary to pay promised social security benefits.

It seems to me, though, that investments in U.S. securities markets, both stocks and bonds, derive their value from the underlying strength of the U.S. economy. If the economy does well, in the long run, markets do well. I

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