David Boaz

In the new movie “The Duchess,” the young Georgiana Spencer is told that the much older and more prominent Duke of Devonshire wishes to marry her.

“He loves me?”

“Oh, yes.”

“But I’ve only met him twice.”

It seemed so current.

The U.S. Postal Service has far less mail to carry, but they’re still not quite ready to cut their massive workforce.

Never before has the U.S. Postal Service laid off workers. Now, it’s a real possibility.

“For the first time in history, that is being considered,” said Gerald McKiernan, a USPS spokesman.

Already, the Postal Service is not hiring because it simply doesn’t move as much mail as it once did. E-mail has taken an increasing amount of its business. McKiernan says mail volume dropped 11 percent in fiscal 2008, which ended Tuesday. That resulted in the service spending $2.3 billion more than it took in.

The workload is down 11 percent, but they’re not yet ready to lay anybody off? That’s government at work. Or non-work.

NPR’s “Studio 360” ran a segment Saturday on conservative folk music of the ’60s. Yes, it existed, though it seems to have been largely parodies of lefty folk songs. One of the clips included was a 1964 tune from the Goldwaters: “Oh, what have you done, left wing, left wing? Oh, what have you done for our country? Well, we’ve raised the national debt, Yeah, it’s going higher yet!”

So it must be a great disappointment to Goldwater Republicans to discover this story that got almost no notice this week:

With no fanfare and little notice, the national debt has grown by more than $4 trillion during George W. Bush’s presidency.

It’s the biggest increase under any president in U.S history.

On the day President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion. The latest number from the Treasury Department shows the national debt now stands at more than $9.849 trillion. That’s a 71.9 percent increase on Mr. Bush’s watch.

The bailout plan now pending in Congress could add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt – though President Bush said this morning he expects that over time, “much if not all” of the bailout money “will be paid back.”

But the government is taking no chances. Buried deep in the hundred pages of bailout legislation is a provision that would raise the statutory ceiling on the national debt to $11.315 trillion. It’ll be the 7th time the debt limit has been raised during this administration.

Which might be why the former lead singer of the Goldwaters says he would describe himself “as a Libertarian today.”

The Washington Post discusses the great new options for street food in downtown Washington–not just hot dogs but “po’ boys, pulled pork, gumbo, shawarma” and more. Sure sounds like the much-criticized D.C. government is really helping this time: The jump headline says, “With City’s Help, Vendors Break the Mold.” Author Tim Carman writes, “Both [new food] vendors still needed public assistance.” And “the city [has] been working with vendors to give hungry Washingtonians a taste of what they want.” All praise the D.C. government, font of good food.

But of course the city hasn’t produced the food. It hasn’t subsidized the vendors. It hasn’t put vendors together with investors. All it has done is to lift, in one part of the city, “regulations that have choked the life out of D.C.’s street food for decades.” There are licensing rules (and a moratorium on issuing any new licenses), prohibitions on hiring employees, cart size rules, regulations on where you can park a cart at night, and so on. So the “public assistance” the vendors received was to be exempted from some of the regulations, inside a 32-block demonstration zone.

It reminds me of the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau: “This government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way.”

Another great column from George Will today, on the House’s “vote against rashness.” With a conservative’s sense of history, he traces some of the policy choices that brought us to today’s crisis:

Suppose that in 1979 the government had not engineered the first bailout of Chrysler (it, Ford and GM are about to get $25 billion in subsidized loans). Might there have been a more sober approach to risk throughout corporate America?

Suppose there had never been implicit government backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Better yet, suppose those two had never existed — there was homeownership before them, just not at a level that the government thought proper. Absent Fannie and Freddie — absent government manipulation of the housing market — would there have developed the excessive diversion of capital into the housing stock?

But really, if you haven’t been reading George Will this year–on the problems with both Obama and McCain, on the automobile bailout, on local government fiscal crises–go here. And to read what he says about his new book, go here (pdf)

The New York Times takes note of the brewing tax revolt in Massachusetts, where a grassroots group has put an initiative on the ballot to repeal the state income tax. The Times headline (on paper) reads, “On Massachusetts Ballot, a Tax Repeal That Worries Leaders.” Why does a newspaper that purports to be a check on government so often present questions from the government’s point of view? Did they once publish headlines like “On Washington Mall, a Peace March That Worries Leaders” or “In Massachusetts, a Civil Rights Crusade That Worries Leaders”? I doubt it.

And I should in fact congratulate reporter Pam Belluck for writing

It would save the average taxpayer about $3,600 a year. Annual revenue from the tax is about $12.5 billion, roughly 45 percent of the state’s budget of about $28 billion.

Too often, as we’ve noted before here on Cato@Liberty, the mainstream media use the formulation “the proposed cut would cost the government millions of dollars.” At least this time Belluck started with the taxpayer.

In 2002 a ballot measure to repeal the income tax got very little attention and still won 45 percent of the vote. This year, with a perception of hard economic times, it might do better. But this time the Establishment is on the alert. The advocates of repeal have raised some $270,000, and after their signature-gathering have only $25,000 left to spend. The special interest groups that thrive on taxpayer money have raised $1.3 million to oppose the initiative.

Let’s hear it for Carla Howell and the Committee for Small Government, who are at least forcing the government–and its beneficiaries–to explain why they need more than the $16 billion of citizens’ money that they would still have after repeal of the income tax. And let’s hear it for pizza shop owner Lakis Theoharis, who tells the Times, “I’m for the repeal of the tax. To me, the smaller the government, the better for the citizens.”

Some commentators are suggesting that the McCain campaign has panicked about Sarah Palin’s appeal, trying to cram her head with policy-wonkery and then hiding her in a closet when that didn’t work. Let Palin be Palin, they say — let her show her authentic self, the gun-totin’, family-raisin’, reformist governor that Alaskans love.

Good idea. Let’s start with the bailout. Surely a rugged individualist reformer from way outside the Beltway is champing at the bit to denounce this $700 billion bailout for Wall Street insiders cooked up by Washington insiders behind closed doors, without public hearings, with the unanimous support of the mainstream media. Let ‘er rip, Governor Palin. Tell the Wall Street bankers that when a small business makes bad decisions in Wasilla, it goes out of business, and the same rules should apply to large businesses in Manhattan. That’s the Sarah Palin conservatives say America would love.

A page one Washington Post headline reports, “Credit Crisis Has Given Obama a Distinct Edge.” Which must be really frustrating for McCain, because McCain did try to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in 2006. Obama, meanwhile, as I reported at the American Spectator, received more donations from Fannie Mae in four years than any other senator (except Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd) received in twenty years. That’s quite an accomplishment–more money from a primary creator of the financial meltdown in just four years than senior members of Congress like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Richard Shelby, Spencer, Bachus, John Kerry, and Roy Blunt got in entire 20 years that the Center for Responsive Politics tallied. And of course, Obama chose former Fannie Mae CEO James Johnson, who was found to have jiggered the books, to head his search for a vice president.

Shouldn’t somebody in the media ask Obama why he was Fannie Mae’s favorite senator?

South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who spoke last Saturday night to our Cato Club 200 retreat, has a great column in the Washington Post today on the federal government’s accelerating tendency to respond to every crisis with an expansion of its powers. He writes:

An ever-expanding scope of federal commitment and power is not what made this country great. Expanded power in one place comes at a cost in other places. American cornerstones such as individual initiative and an entrepreneurial spirit — born in free and open societies with private property rights and the rule of law — have never fit particularly well within the context of an ever-growing federal government.

For 200 years, the “business model” in our country has rested on a simple fact: that while one may reap rewards from taking risks, one should also be prepared to face the consequences of those risks. Some of the proposed actions with regard to the credit market turn that business model on its head — absolving those who took too much risk, or bought too much house, from the weight of their own choices. If Congress passes the proposed bailout, we will be destined to have far greater problems in time, leaving those who are prudent in their finances to foot the bill for those who are not.

He goes on to appeal to the wisdom of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Edward Gibbon in cautioning Congress not to put us on the path to “decline and fall.”

Bonus: Mark Sanford on Real ID here (podcast audio), here (speech video) and here (speech PDF).

Newt Gingrich tells the Washington Post, “We have now launched big-government Republicanism.” Referring to the Bush administration’s bailout-and-takeover plan for the financial sector, he said, “If we saw France do this, Italy do this, we would have thought it was crazy.”

He has a point. But some of us identified “big-government conservatism” as the operating system of the current Republican party a long time ago. I wrote about it in the Australian in early 2003 and in the Washington Post in late 2003. Or check out Bill Niskanen’s comments in this 2004 Los Angeles Times article. Of course, Ed Crane saw it coming in 1999. And Mike Tanner wrote a whole book about it — Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution — in 2007.

Or you could read Mike Tanner’s critique of “Gingrich’s Big Government Manifesto” back in 2006.