Author: Norman Leahy

I’ve written many times in this space about how our own government regularly violates our privacy, personal security and Fourth Amendment rights. The bipartisan political class generally ignores such encroachments, preferring instead to chase assorted hobgoblins like TikTok like so many pitchfork wielding peasants. Would that they cared enough, or were honest enough, to look at the threats within their own purview. As Joseph Cox reports in this piece for Vice, the OG privacy vandals – the Drug Enforcement Administration – long used methods that skirted, or flat-out ignored, constitutional restrictions on surveillance: For years, the DEA secretly paid workers…

The First Amendment is clear that the federal government – and through the Fourteenth Amendment, all state governments – cannot abridge the people’s rights to free speech. Nor can the state compel the people to engage in certain types of speech, an example of which is a 1943 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a West Virginia law requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance: In an opinion written by Robert Houghwout Jackson, the Court found that the First Amendment cannot enforce a unanimity of opinion on any topic, and national symbols like the flag should not receive a…

Few people know it, but the federal government has something called a “general fund,” based in the Treasury Department, that is supposed to keep track of all the money Uncle Sam spends every year. In short, it’s a mammoth series of ledgers that serves as a record of income and outgo. And every year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducts an audit of the books to make sure everything has been reported correctly (even if the bottom line is awash in red ink). Just how much money are we talking about here? Trillions upon trillions of dollars: In fiscal year…

The federal budget is (very) slowly working its way through Congress with a fiscal year-end deadline in September. While Congress has an ingrained, bipartisan habit of missing that deadline, the budget preliminaries have provided at least one clear assessment of why we’re in such a fiscal mess. In testimony before the House Budget Committee, Tax Foundation senior advisor Scott Hodge noted the ballooning cost of entitlement programs – which official Washington has decided are doing just fine, nothing to see here. But he also took strong issue with the timetable for the arrested trust funds that support these programs to…

Congressional Republicans and the Biden administration agree on one major portion of the federal budget: The major entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare, are not up for debate. The reason is almost entirely political, given that neither party wants to be the object of a profoundly cynical ad campaign portraying its incumbents as the ones who pushed grandma over a cliff. And so the major parties will pretend, out of fear for their political careers, that nothing’s amiss in the entitlement sector. Except they all know the numbers: Social Security is going bust. And according to a report from…

President Joe Biden has yet to make an official announcement about his reelection plans. While the conventional wisdom is Biden will run again (for reference, Barack Obama declared his quest for a second term on April 4, 2011), there’s still the question of how excited the Democratic base is about that possibility. Just how indifferent Democrats are right now comes from polling data out of Monmouth University. While the usual caveats about accuracy apply to any poll on a national election this far removed from Election Day, the data in this poll mirrors that of other, older polls. The bottom…

While we’re on the topic of crony capitalism – or, as Frederic Bastiat so devastatingly called it, “legal plunder” – it turns out the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act which larder subsides on the green energy sector, may cost hundreds of billions of dollars more than previously thought. Yes, hundreds of billions of dollars more. The original cost estimate: roughly $391 billion over 10 years. The real figure could be $1.2 trillion. Even by the magical thinking that substitutes for budgeting in official Washington, this is a whopper of a miscalculation. How did it happen? The Wall Street Journal points to…

“Legal plunder” is just one way state power is used to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Another method the political class uses to extract compliance, acceptance and so on from the private sector is the old-fashioned shakedown. Consider the case of the panic over egg prices just a few months ago. Egg prices went up – a lot – contributing to inflation. The political class and its hangers-on latched onto egg prices as a sure sign of corporate greed in action. But reality is a complex and messy thing that often escapes the preferred narratives and…

The recent congressional hearings in which members questioned (and harangued) TikTok CEO Shou Chew went according to plan: members rode the moral panic wave for all it was worth. And no minds were changed. The pols are keen to ban the platform; the platform is just as keen to show it’s not a tool of the Chinese government. What did not come out of the hearings were questions about whether the state should be banning a social media platform (never mind how it would enforce a ban without looking exactly like the thuggish authoritarians the worthies say are brainwashing kids).…

One of the enduring tropes of political journalism is to criticize the other side for behavior that’s as well-entrenched – if not perfected – on one’s own. Such is the case with the Biden administration’s big push into national industrial policy – or what is sometimes called “crony capitalism” or “corporate welfare.” While it is undeniably true, as The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley writes, that the current administration’s series of handouts, subsidies and other protectionist measures come with many progressive strings attached, such economic central planning has always required favored recipients to sing for their supper. And it has…