According to Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, who chairs the House budget committee, it’s just a start. “The spending limit measure marks another step in House Republicans’ continued efforts to change Washington’s pervasive culture of spending,” he announced.

Let’s hope so. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reminded us last week, America is on an unsustainable fiscal path, borrowing an unprecedented $1.5 trillion this year, or almost 10 percent of GDP. If no serious spending reductions are enacted, the national doubt will amount to 100 percent of GDP by 2021.

As a result of massive deficit spending in the past years, Congress will have to vote to raise the federal debt ceiling this spring. According to Ryan, lawmakers “must first work to enact serious spending cuts and reforms. Endless borrowing is not a strategy.”

One way to reverse the trend is to freeze federal spending altogether. Revenues collapsed to barely 15 percent of the national income as a result of the recession but the CBO estimates that tax revenues will grow by an average of 7.3 percent annually over the next decade.

Without an increase in government spending, the budget will balance itself by 2014. Even if spending is allowed to keep pace with inflation and grow at 2 percent a year, the budget balances before 2020.

Legislators are unlikely to adopt such a proposal however as it would effectively amount to across the board budget cuts, year after year. No politician likes to go back to their constitutes every two years to announce that there’s less money available for their children’s education and their parents’ retirement again—not unless they make clear that government has no business educating children and providing for people’s pensions that is.

Instead, here are some comprehensive proposals that Washington should consider:

• Former Republican majority leader Dick Armey and Tea Party organizer Matt Kibbe identified hundreds of billions in potential spending cuts two weeks ago.
• Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has some $500 billion in spending cuts (PDF) that could be implemented this year.
• Fox Business’ John Stossel also sees hundreds of billions in spending that could go.

All of them propose to abolish entire departments of government, including energy and education which should be left to the free market. Even without addressing America’s looming entitlement disaster, they manage to balance the books! Surely, Republicans can do better than a meager $32 billion?

As several states throughout the country teeter on the brink of bankruptcy and American education standards remain absolutely dismal compared to the rest of the developed world, it is high time for a bold reform effort. More spending is not the solution though. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rhee notes that some of her organization’s proposals “are even budget opportunities for savvy governors and lawmakers.”

Treating teachers like professionals is an important first step. “Compensation, staffing decisions and professional development should be based on teachers’ effectiveness, not on their seniority,” according to Rhee.

On the Fox Business Network Tuesday, she admitted that tenure will be difficult to get rid of. “If there are any protections that should be afforded to someone in public education, it should be to children, not to adults,” however. “We don’t believe that tenure protections should be in place for ineffective teachers,” Rhee added.

In DC, Rhee experimented with merit pay, offering teachers a choice in 2008: either being paid up to $140,000 a year based on student achievement while losing their tenure or retaining it while earning far less. Unions strongly protested the measure but student performance gradually rose during Rhee’s chancellorship. She still supports the notion.

It’s incredibly important because we have so many hard working teachers out there who are doing amazing things for kids. And we need to become a profession that recognizes and rewards the best people.

Union regulations often make it nigh impossible to fire bad teachers. In DC, Rhee repeatedly faced opposition from the unions when she tried to lay off underperforming teachers. She succeeded though, if only in part, to make the profession more competitive.

On his own Fox Business show last year, John Stossel complained about the situation, suggesting that it is part of the reason why education is so expensive in the United States while test scores remain low. “When your job and salary is pretty much guaranteed,” he said, “why work harder?”

The many steps that schools have to go through in order to fire a teacher are so extensive that many principles don’t bother. “Sometimes they just transfer the worst teachers to other schools,” according to Stossel. Administrators call it “the dance of the lemons” or “passing the trash.” Funny—”except it could be your kid who has that teacher.”

Rhee doesn’t want unions out of the way altogether though. “The teacher unions are just doing their job,” she told Fox Business. “They’re protecting the rights and privileges of their members which they should do. We just need to make sure that Students First is as a force in this country that protects the rights and privileges of children first and foremost.”

Last May, Stossel was quick to come to Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul’s side when the son of libertarian Texas Congressman Ron Paul was vehemently criticized by left wing commentators for supposedly defending segregation.

Paul was asked on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show whether or not the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids businesses from denying service to people on grounds of their race, blurred the lines between public and private ownership. Paul made it clear that while he opposed any form of discrimination, freedoms of speech and enterprise should always trump the quest for equality. “I don’t want to be associated with those people,” said Paul, referring to racists, “but I also don’t want to limit their speech in any way.”

Asked to comment on the Fox New Network, Stossel opined that private businesses “ought to get to discriminate. I won’t ever go to a place that’s racist,” he said, “and I’ll tell everybody else not to. And I’ll speak against it. But it should be their right to be racist.”

To Perdomo that sounds like not just defending racism, but encouraging it. She conveniently misquotes the aforementioned statement to make it seem as though Stossel wants businesses to discriminate, neglecting to represent his views in full.

The article goes on to cite other Fox News anchors who find Stossel’s libertarian views too radical for their tastes. Perdomo leaves no doubt about their bigotry—indeed, “Fox News has a longstanding policy of giving race-baiters a soapbox,” she believes—but when it comes to judging Stossel, they are right, for once, it seems.

Also quoted is the executive director of ColorofChange.org, James Rucker, who says that Stossel is more dangerous than Glenn Beck because the former appears to be less insane. “In Stossel you appeal to people who aren’t happy with a black guy in the White House who is trying to figure out how government can support everyday Americans,” according to Rucker. He volunteers no proof for this preposterous assertion, nor does Perdomo, simply because they can’t. Never has Stossel even referred to the president’s race when criticizing his policies. Assuming that his audience isn’t “happy with a black guy in the White House” without bothering to offer any evidence whatsoever in support is condescending and presumptuous of Rucker—and bad journalism of Perdomo’s part for publishing such a statement without disclaimer. Instead, Perdomom perpetuates that narrative and boasts:

There you have it. Racism and closed-mindedness, in the respected figure of a Princeton graduate and decorated journalist, whose soft-spoken yet hate-filled speech is made palatable by his disclaimer that although he believes businesses should have a right to be racist, he personally would boycott such establishments.

She throws in a final sneer aimed at Stossel’s free market views, describing him as part of a “new generation of ignorant hate” which “wants to make us believe that market forces will solve America’s racial problems. This is, of course, wrong—and very dangerous.” Indeed, it’s so obvious apparently that it requires no elaboration. Because defending free enterprise is racist, free enterprise is “very dangerous” altogether, perhaps?

On his Fox Business Network show last week, John Stossel asked precisely that question, noting that whenever the war appears to be successful, as it has been in Colombia, the problem simply moves elsewhere, to Bolivia and Mexico, where cartels up to this very day are engaged in fierce confrontations with police. Meanwhile, drugs are still readily available on America’s streets. In fact, the country is funding both sides of the war, with the government spending almost the exact amount on law enforcement and foreign aid as American citizens buy in drugs.

By any standard then, the War on Drugs is a failure. What’s more though, it’s illegitimate.

A just government should not be allowed to decide what products its citizens can and cannot consume or enjoy. It is not the government’s responsibility to protect people against themselves. Proponents of strict drug laws may argue that drug use poses a threat to the community, because people on drugs, like people who are intoxicated with alcohol, have less control over their behavior and might indeed act erratically and aggressively. They further allege that drug use would undoubtedly rise when drug laws are loosened.

Both claims are demonstrably false. The most popular drugs, including marijuana and ecstasy, do not make people more aggressive. To the contrary. Drug addiction and abuse are serious problems but hardly more so than alcohol addiction and abuse. It makes no sense to criminalize the one and control the other with sensible laws, like not allowing drunk and disorderly conduct and not allowing drunks to drive.

As for the fear that drug use would increase if it were legalized; there is no evidence to support this claim. No matter the stereotypes, the one country that has practically legalized soft drugs, the Netherlands, has proven that the contrary is true. The number of teens and young adult who have experimented with drugs in the Netherlands pales in comparison with American statistics.

The Dutch drug policy has not been able to put a stop to related crime altogether but the legalization of certain kinds of drugs is not to blame here. Rather, the problem lies in the ambiguity of Dutch drug laws. While people are allowed to buy and use drugs in limited quantities, it remains illegal for sellers to purchase them—forcing them to resort to crime.

The Dutch tolerance of drug use was originally born out of the libertarian conviction that it is not the government’s place to try to condition its population. People should be allowed smoke, drink alcohol and use drugs, even if it’s bad for their health.

In the American approach, this notion is altogether lacking. Instead, unyielding drug laws, which include mandatory sentences for even the slightest of offenses, are driven by fear and ignorance and the ambitions of lawmakers who want to be considered tough on drugs.

The result is something of a police state as could be seen in John Stossel’s show last Thursday. Regularly, all across the country, SWAT teams barge into peoples’ houses on the suspicion of drug possession, arresting ordinary people, even parents, because they had the audacity to smoke pot in the privacy of their own homes. Teenagers who try marijuana once could be ruined for life. Every day, more people are arrested in the United States on drug charges than all other crimes combined. In 2008, 1.5 million Americans were arrested for drug offenses. 500,000 were imprisoned. Marijuana constitutes almost half of all drug arrests. So naturally Stossel concludes that, “the drug laws do more damage than the drugs.”

No matter the futility of the War on Drugs; no matter the thousands of deaths and lives ruined; no matter the fact that law enforcement is becoming evermore brutal in its pursuits and that America is slowly turning into a prison nation because of its prejudice, the question ultimately boils down to one of civil liberties. As Stossel put it, “Either we own our body or we don’t.” It is on this argument that the fight against those who favor government control in this regard should be waged and won.

Advertisement

One of the most objectionable qualities of a government monopoly on education is its protection of teachers which makes it well-nigh impossible to fire them.

In a free market, workers that don’t function lose their job. The risk of being fired ensures that people do their job well. In a system so infested with regulation, lobbyists and union rules as is the case in the United States, however, teachers can easily stay in front of a classroom for many years, regardless of their performance.

On his Fox Business show last February 18, John Stossel complained about the situation, stating that it is part of the reason why education is so expensive in the United States while test scores remain low. “When your job and salary is pretty much guaranteed,” he said, “why work harder?”

The many steps that schools have to go through in order to fire a teacher are so extensive that many principles don’t bother. “Sometimes they just transfer the worst teachers to other schools,” said Stossel. Administrators call it “the dance of the lemons” or “passing the trash.” Funny—”except it could be your kid who has that teacher.”

Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert of Newsweek agree and they report that, “In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure,” courtesy of the unions. “In no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from accountability.”

Consequently, “teaching in public schools has not always attracted the best and the brightest.” Most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high school students. With public schools often the only option available to low-income families, children with the greatest interest in social advancement are stuck with the least inspiring of teachers. “Over time, inner-city schools, in particular, succumbed to a defeatist mindset.”

School superintendents and unions have been blaming everyone but themselves in recent decades. First, it was the parents, or the absence of parents, that accounted for students’ poor test scores. Next, society “with all its distractions and pathologies” got the blame. Finally, the kids themselves were the problem. Regardless of academic performance, the thinking went, public schools had to keep going through the motions to promote social equality and hope the students graduated. Except that just sixty percent of African Americans and Hispanics finish high school.

Teaching isn’t easy but students deserve the best education available to them. Allowing teachers to stay in their job when they don’t succeed at it is quite probably the single greatest problem with American education today.

“The road to serfdom is not necessarily going to take the form of a Stalin or a Hitler,” according to Hudgins. “It will be all of these little small things.” Denying Americans the freedom of enterprise and subjecting them to meddlesome laws and taxes that make it near impossible to turn a profit are the warning signs of statism. Bureaucrats have become “obsessed with regulating everything,” notes Hudgins,

Denying people their natural rights, property rights foremost among them, but the freedom of enterprise close second, is at the root of the problem.

The 2010 Index of Economic Freedom published by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal earlier this year warned that, “Government interventions in financial markets and the automotive sector have raised concerns about expropriation and violation of the contractual rights of shareholders and bondholders.”

And for good reason. Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina writes in the Washington Times that the Federal Government intends to “seize more than ten million acres from Montana to New Mexico, halting job-creating activities like ranching, forestry, mining and energy development.” The president, he knows, could enact these plans “with just the stroke of a pen.”

As states’ rights are threatened, some are taking preemptive action. Rethinking the United States reports that there are states which have passed non-binding resolutions reaffirming their Tenth Amendment right to regulate all affairs not provided to the Federal Government in the Constitution. “Others like Montana, Utah and Tennessee have passed laws like the Firearms Freedom Act declaring all firearms produced and purchased in state only are free from federal regulation.”

The threat of expropriation comes with an increased regulation of enterprise. Combined with the traditional ambiguity of antitrust law, this leaves American business in limbo. The Index of Economic Freedom attest that the “uncertainties caused by ongoing regulatory changes and politically influenced stimulus spending have discouraged entrepreneurship and job creation, slowing recovery.” Yet predictably, many policy makers in Washington demand that even more money is spent to “stimulate” the economy out of recession.

Add to that: health care reform. Mark Steyns, in an article for the National Review, predicts that it will redefine “the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible.”

Obamacare represents the government annexation of “one-sixth of the US economy”—i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people.

Government health care is “not about health care,” writes Steyns; “it’s about government.” It won’t matter if the Republicans return to power after it’s passed. Such an immense expansion of government will create a “vast left-wing bureaucracy” with the ability to “cruise on regardless” of political change.

These, are many more, infringements upon personal responsibility are premised upon the same paternalism: that government knows what’s best for people; that security and well-being are more important than liberty; that each man is his brother’s keeper and government, the ultimate caretaker. This is the doctrine of altruism.

Sadly, both major parties in the United States have made law according to the same code of morality, with few exceptions (Congressman Paul Ryan is one). The recent Tea Party movement and the return to true conservatism are encouraging signs that resistance to Big Government is mounting. But people are also fighting on the individual level.

On Stossel’s show, Hudgins spoke of many individuals and businesses fleeing the state of California for neighboring Nevada and Arizona where taxes are lower and government regulation is less intrusive. People may not easily “go Galt” but men of ability will always resist being punished for their success.

Medical care in the United States is—as in so many countries around the Western World—heavily regulated so there is little reason to presume that more legislation will make the system better.

Part of the regulation comes in the form of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which supervises the safety of cosmetics, food, tobacco, medications and medical equipment, as well as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which is tasked to fight the use and trafficking of substances declared illegal by federal law.

At his blog, libertarian columnist and Fox News contributor John Stossel questions the legitimacy of these agencies and their right to limit Americans’ freedom of choice.

Stossel cites the story of Bruce Tower, a man struggling with cancer who wished treatment with a drug that the FDA hadn’t approved.

One bureaucrat told him the government was protecting him from dangerous side effects. Tower’s outraged response was: “Side effects, who cares? Every treatment I’ve had I’ve suffered from side-effects. If I’m terminal it should be my option to endure any side-effects.”

Stossel agrees. “Why, in our ‘free’ country,” he asks, “do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?”

In an interview with Stuart Varney on the Fox Business Network on February 23, Stossel explained why people are so quick to accept government control over which medicine they may and may not use. “It’s instictive to say, let [the FDA] be in there. There are all these guys who want to sell me snake oil. I’m glad the FDA is there to make sure the drugs are safe and effective.” People like the idea of someone watching over them, making sure that they aren’t exposed to bad products or corporate malpractice.

Without government intervention though, wouldn’t people be all the more vulnerable to bad medicine? But Stossel notes that a “private system” is not based on “trusting drug companies.”

Competition leads both drug companies and private regulators to be trustworthy. If they are not trustworthy, they die. Fear of losing business and fear of lawsuits [...] “coerce them into honesty.” American food makers rarely poison us today not because of government regulation, which is largely ineffectual, but because they know that if they poison their customers, they’ll go out of business.

The FDA may protect people from “bad stuff,” said Stossel, “but it’s a far bigger injury that they protect us from good stuff, too.”

Advertisement

In spite of ever rising costs and increasingly disappointing results, the government monopoly on education is hardly ever called into question. Education, defenders of the system argue, is too important to leave to the free market.

The arguments put forward by those in favor of a state-run system typically boil down to two misleading claims. First, that education cannot or should not be a profitable enterprise and second, that without extensive government regulations and controls, social inequality will widen.

The fact that private schools exist and prosper throughout the world disproves the first claim in part. There are many families who do not have the resources to pay for their children’s education which seems to necessitate government interference. Is their need ample reason to force others to provide for them however?

In spite of many decades of state-run schools and legislative restraints on private initiatives, social inequality is still present and in some societies, prevalent. While public schooling allows youngsters of ability to rise on the social ladder more easily, poverty as such has not been eradicated.

The downsides of the “government option” also deserve mention. The lack of fair competition means that private schools are more expensive than they would otherwise probably be while in public schools, especially in the United States, test scores are low. These schools, consequently, have come to oppose standardized testing, arguing that poor performance is harmful to a child’s self-esteem. Rather than allowing quick learners to advance, classes are rarely organized according to ability. Uniform curricula and peer pressure discourage excellence instead. Government-run schools now mass-produce mediocrity.

Pupils, and parents, deserve a better choice than this. Indeed, they deserve choice to begin with. John Stossel, libertarian columnist and Fox News contributor, tells the story of low-income families, desperate to get their child into a private school because the public system is failing them miserably. The answer? Competition. “It makes everything better.”

Parents care about their kids and want them to learn and succeed—even poor parents. Thousands line up hoping to get their kids into one of the few hundred lottery-assigned slots at Harlem Success Academy, a highly ranked charter school in New York City. Kids and parents cry when they lose.

Yet professionals and politicians oppose choice. The teachers’ union demonstrated outside Harlem Success the first day of school while President Barack Obama killed Washington DC’s voucher program.

Why do parents with meager resources pass up “free” government schools and sacrifice to send their children to private schools? Because, as one parent told the BBC, the private owner will do something that’s virtually impossible in America’s government schools: replace teachers who do not teach.

Allow fair and full competition between schools and Stossel predicts that test scores will go up. Parents, after all, will send their children to the best school available to them. But without choice, anything goes, and those trapped in the public system will never have the same chances in life as those who enjoyed the good fortunate of being educated in a private school.

Russell Roberts of George Mason University explains that capitalism is a system of profits and losses: profits that encourage risk taking and losses which encourages prudance. “When you take away the loss, which is what we’ve been doing systematically in the United States,” according to the Roberts, “what are you left with? You’re left with socialism for the rich.” If corporations are assured that a government bailout will be available to them whenever they screw up, their risk taking spins out of control.

Political lobbyism is to a large extent to blame. “Pretty much everyone who is a lobbyist right now,” said Marta Mossburg of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, “has worked on Capitol Hill.”

Banks and businesses are anxious to hire Washington insiders to do their bidding. Mossburg warned of a situation “where you need more and more lobbyists in order to do the goverment’s work; in order to do business’ work.” The greatest problem? Overly complicated tax codes. Without them, “you would not need any of these lobbyists.”

Productiveness and trade are the two indispensable pillars of free market capitalism. But, as Stossel pointed out, lobbyists aren’t producing anything. Indeed, “They’re not creating anything,” said Mossburg, “except more regulation—which then again, requires more lobbying.”

The most upsetting part, added Roberts, is that lobbyists pretend to service the public’s interest. “In the guise of creating a fairer system or a more competative system, they actually channel regulation and funds toward their friends.”

“The answer, we’re told,” said Stossel, “is some new regulation that will solve this problem.” Roberts reacted: “Every time we reform the system we move toward [...] building a fail-safe system,” which the United States have been trying since the 1930s. “Maybe we ought to go in a different direction. Let’s let people fend for themselves. It’s called capitalism.”