• The federal government is assuming a larger share of the Medicaid bill.
• General Electric might eventually need to be renamed Government Electric.
• The government’s mail monopoly lost $3.8 billion last fiscal year and could lose more this year.
• The $98 billion in improper payments made by the federal government last year undermines the case for expanding its role in subsidizing health care.
• Cost overruns in the British government mirror problems in the U.S. government.

But that doesn't come close to measuring its true cost. The bill uses various accounting gimmicks to hide its true cost. For example the bill doesn't include more than $200 billion needed to prevent a 21 percent cut in Medicare next year. [The CBO "score" actually assumes Reid cuts Medicare 23 percent -- Ed.] That cost has been spun off into a separate bill, even though the Senate voted down that approach last month.

Moreover (as Jeffrey H. Anderson notes), much of the spending is back-loaded. The bill doesn't start spending until 2014, and only costs $9 billion that year. But by 2019, the annual cost hits $196 billion. The minority staff of the Senate Budget Committee reports that, if you factor out all the budget gimmicks and look at the 10 years of actual implementation, the cost is closer to $2.5 trillion.

And, while Reid brags that the bill will reduce the deficit by $127 billion over the next 10 years (which is about $50 billion less than the deficit the government ran last month alone), even that tiny savings depends on budget gimmicks and the willingness of future Congresses to make huge cuts in Medicare spending. Any wagers on the chances of that actually happening? In fact, even the CBO warns that it will be "difficult" to achieve the predicted savings.

Perhaps more important, much of the cost has simply been shifted from the federal budget onto the backs of workers, businesses and state governments. Judging by previous reforms, as much as 60 percent of the cost won't show up in government accounting.

To pay for all the new spending, Reid would enact at least 15 new or increased taxes totaling more than $493 billion.

But the cost alone doesn't begin to describe how intrusive this bill would be for the average American. For instance, it would require everyone to buy a government-designed insurance plan, even if it was more expensive than their current policy. Failure to comply brings a penalty of up to $6,750 for a family of four.

Another provision would mandate that employers provide insurance to their workers. If they fail to do so, and if even a single worker qualified for federal subsidies, the employer could be fined up to $750 per employee. The CBO estimates that those penalties will amount to more than $28 billion.

Unemployment is now 10.2 percent, and the Senate bill will make it more costly to hire workers. And because the penalty only applies in the case of subsidy-eligible workers, it is low-wage and unskilled workers that will suffer the most.

Of course, the plan contains the government-run "public option" that many experts believe will ultimately crowd out private insurers. And don't be misled by Reid's "opt-out" provision: It comes with so many restrictions that it will be nearly impossible for a state to actually opt out.

Besides, there won't be any opting out of the taxes that will ultimately be necessary to pay for it.

Finally, the bill sets the stage for government-imposed rationing. If you think the recent controversy over mammograms is something, just wait until the dozens of new boards, commissions and agencies created by this bill get to work. The "reform" also gives the secretary of Health and Human Services broad new powers to determine "quality," "efficiency" and "appropriate utilization."

At first, these restrictions would only apply to government programs like Medicare, but they'd create the framework for eventual extension to private insurance.

If Reid gets the 60 votes he needs to pass this, US taxpayers, businesses and patients can expect to pay a high price for this congressional feast.

According to the Chamber of Commerce polls, strong majorities in every state they polled believe the health care bills will increase the deficit. In this case the public’s cynical instincts are almost certain to be more accurate than the computer models of the CBO. As David Dickson of the Washington Times reviewed yesterday, government health care programs have a history of cost overruns.

And not small overruns, like overdrawing your checking account — massive, order-of-magnitude cost overruns. Is that because politicians intentionally overstate the benefits and underestimate the costs of their proposals? Or just that computer models aren’t very good at predicting how entitlements programs change behavior? Either way, just look at the record: In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee said the entire Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was $98 billion. In 1987, Congress projected that Medicaid would make special relief payments to hospitals of less than $1 billion in 1992. The actual cost, just five years after the projection, was $17 billion. Similarly, Medicare’s home care benefit was projected in 1988 to cost $4 billion in 1993, but the actual cost — again, just five years after the projection — was $10 billion.

The government is running a trillion-dollar annual deficit already, and Congress and the president propose to create a new program that promises to cover millions more people with health insurance, drag currently insured people onto government programs, and save billions of dollars in the process. No wonder levels of trust in government are at record lows.

In addition to being theoretically misguided, critics sometimes blame Obama for things that are not his fault. Listening to a talk radio program yesterday, the host asserted that Obama tripled the budget deficit in his first year. This assertion is understandable, since the deficit jumped from about $450 billion in 2008 to $1.4 trillion in 2009. As this chart illustrates, with the Bush years in green, it appears as if Obama’s policies have led to an explosion of debt.

But there is one rather important detail that makes a big difference. The chart is based on the assumption that the current administration should be blamed for the 2009 fiscal year. While this makes sense to a casual observer, it is largely untrue. The 2009  fiscal year began October 1, 2008, nearly four months before Obama took office. The budget for the entire fiscal year was largely set in place while Bush was in the White House. So is we update the chart to show the Bush fiscal years in green, we can see that Obama is partly right in claiming that he inherited a mess (though Obama actually deserves a small share of the blame for Bush’s last deficit since earlier this year he pushed through both an “omnibus” spending bill and the so-called stimulus bill that increased FY2009 spending).

It should go without saying that this post is not an argument for Obama’s fiscal policy. The current President promised change, but he is continuing the wasteful and profligate policies of his big-spending predecessor. That is where critics should be focusing their attention.

To celebrate this milestone, we offer the following video, which pretty well summarizes Byrd’s extremely long tenure in the Senate.  If you ever wanted to know what corruption looks like, here’s your chance.  Be sure to catch what Byrd says at the very end.

That video brings to mind an old folk song that, ironically enough, Byrd himself recorded in 1978:

I went out on a party, I led the pace that kills
When I woke up, that gang had gone and left me all the bills

I found them over on the corner, near Soul Salvation Hall
That drunken bunch was out there singing Jesus Paid It All

They put me out in a dry goods box, Lord, my pillow was hard
I wish I’d  bought me a half a pint and stayed in the wagon yard

The moral of the story? Don’t monkey with them Washington ducks — you’ll find them slick as lard.

President Obama was eloquent in his defense of freedom in the heart of an authoritarian country:

The United States, by comparison, is a young nation, whose culture is determined by the many different immigrants who have come to our shores, and by the founding documents that guide our democracy.

America will always speak out for these core principles around the world.   We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation, but we also don’t believe that the principles that we stand for are unique to our nation.  These freedoms of expression and worship — of access to information and political participation — we believe are universal rights.

Those documents put forward a simple vision of human affairs, and they enshrine several core principles — that all men and women are created equal, and possess certain fundamental rights; that government should reflect the will of the people and respond to their wishes; that commerce should be open, information freely accessible; and that laws, and not simply men, should guarantee the administration of justice….

Those are important American values, and I agree with the president that they are universal, as classical liberals have long argued. But I’m disappointed that President Obama didn’t cite freedom of enterprise,  property rights, and limited government as American values. Those are not only the necessary conditions for growth and prosperity, they are the necessary foundation for civil liberties.

He did glancingly mention in the paragraph above that “commerce should be open, information freely accessible,” so that’s half a clause about commerce, I guess. But that’s it for the freedoms that allow people to work and save, create, build, invest, and prosper. He noted that “China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty — an accomplishment unparalleled in human history” but didn’t examine how that happened. (Hint: economic reforms that moved toward free markets and (quasi) property rights.)

His only subsequent mention of freedom touched on economics in the context of citizen participation and the Internet:

Now, that’s not just true in — for government and politics. It’s also true for business.  You think about a company like Google that only 20 years ago was — less than 20 years ago was the idea of a couple of people not much older than you.  It was a science project.  And suddenly because of the Internet, they were able to create an industry that has revolutionized commerce all around the world.  So if it had not been for the freedom and the openness that the Internet allows, Google wouldn’t exist.

So I’m a big supporter of not restricting Internet use, Internet access, other information technologies like Twitter.

Yes, “the freedom and the openness that the Internet allows” were important to the development of Google. But more fundamental was the freedom of enterprise in America. There’s a reason that so many technological advances and consumer benefits are developed in the world’s freest economies. Property rights, freedom of exchange, low taxes, and limited restrictions on entreneurship allow people to invest and create.

Contrast the speech that President Reagan gave to the students who were still behind the Iron Curtain in 1988. Start with the way he addressed a very similar point to the one Obama made about Google:

The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States. They are the prime movers of the technological revolution. In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in the United States was started by two college students, no older than you, in the garage behind their home.

Reagan praised democracy and justice and openness:

At the same time, the growth of democracy has become one of the most powerful political movements of our age….Democracy is the standard by which governments are measured.We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom. In fact, it’s something of a national pastime. Every 4 years the American people choose a new President, and 1988 is one of those years. At one point there were 13 major candidates running in the two major parties, not to mention all the others, including the Socialist and Libertarian candidates — all trying to get my job. About 1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and 1,700 daily newspapers — each one an independent, private enterprise, fiercely independent of the Government — report on the candidates, grill them in interviews, and bring them together for debates. In the end, the people vote; they decide who will be the next President.But freedom doesn’t begin or end with elections.

Go to any American town, to take just an example, and you’ll see dozens of churches, representing many different beliefs — in many places, synagogues and mosques — and you’ll see families of every conceivable nationality worshiping together. Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights — among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — that no government can justly deny; the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Go into any courtroom, and there will preside an independent judge, beholden to no government power. There every defendant has the right to a trial by a jury of his peers, usually 12 men and women — common citizens; they are the ones, the only ones, who weigh the evidence and decide on guilt or innocence. In that court, the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the word of a policeman or any official has no greater legal standing than the word of the accused. Go to any university campus, and there you’ll find an open, sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American society and what can be done to correct them. Turn on the television, and you’ll see the legislature conducting the business of government right there before the camera, debating and voting on the legislation that will become the law of the land. March in any demonstration, and there are many of them; the people’s right of assembly is guaranteed in the Constitution and protected by the police. Go into any union hall, where the members know their right to strike is protected by law….

But freedom is more even than this. Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things.

And he came back to the basic purpose of democracy in the American context, not a plebiscitary system but a way to ensure that the governors don’t exceed the consent of the governed: “Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive; a system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith.”

He tied all of these freedoms to the American commitment to economic freedom as well. Throughout the speech he tried to enlighten students who had grown up under communism about the meaning of free enterprise:

Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the successful ones; often several times. And if you ask them the secret of their success, they’ll tell you it’s all that they learned in their struggles along the way; yes, it’s what they learned from failing. Like an athlete in competition or a scholar in pursuit of the truth, experience is the greatest teacher….

And that’s why it’s so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world.

He even explained why China would one day, as President Obama said, lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty:

We are seeing the power of economic freedom spreading around the world — places such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan have vaulted into the technological era, barely pausing in the industrial age along the way. Low-tax agricultural policies in the sub-continent mean that in some years India is now a net exporter of food. Perhaps most exciting are the winds of change that are blowing over the People’s Republic of China, where one-quarter of the world’s population is now getting its first taste of economic freedom.

President Obama said some important things to the Chinese students. But his continuing failure to mention the virtues of productive enterprise in a commencement address or to note the centrality of economic freedom in the American experiment could easily lead listeners to conclude that he really doesn’t care much for business and economic liberty.

Late last night, Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy sketched out his predictions of whether the individual justices would go for Gura’s main argument: that the indefensible Slaughter-House Cases should be overturned and thus that the Court should “incorporate” the rights at issue via the Privileges or Immunities Clause.  (Cato supports this argument, as we’ll show in the brief we’ll be filing next week.) He concludes that Justice Thomas is the only vote available for this claim. According to Orin, the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia and Alito are too enamored with stare decisis to overturn an 1873 precedent, Justice Kennedy isn’t an originalist and likes substantive due process too much, and the other four are too afraid of Lochner and Institute for Justice-style economic liberty arguments to go there.

As George Will would say: Well. Orin could turn out to be right, but I think his analysis is too simplistic. I was just about to write my response when I saw that Josh Blackman, with whom I have a law review article forthcoming on these issues, already said it best in the comments to Orin’s post:

First, I think you present a binary choice; incorporate through Due Process OR incorporate through privileges or immunities. The question presented asked about both routes of incorporation. Neither path is by necessity mutually exclusive. As Gura’s brief makes clear, the Court could incorporate through the Due Process Clause, and alternatively recognize that the right to keep and bear arms is also among the Privileges or Immunities of Citizenship. The Court need not displace 100 years of substantive due process jurisprudence with this single case. And from a practical perspective, basically the entire Bill of Rights has been incorporated. So, unless some people start clamoring about states quartering troops in theirs homes, this would be a one time deal. Such a holding would do little to upset the apple cart, or as we put it, open Pandora’s Box.

Second, I think you may over-simplify Scalia’s views on originalism and stare decisis. Our article shows that Scalia, while on the Supreme Court, has never voted in favor of a substantive due process incorporation. The last such case was in 1982. Can Scalia really cite the doctrine that he excoriated in Lawrence, Casey, and elsewhere based solely on reliance interests? It is no secret Scalia likes guns, and he wants to incorporate the 2nd Amendment. But he does not want to enlarge substantive due process. Is he stuck between a rock and a substantively hard place? The Privileges or Immunities Clause provides an alternative method for Scalia. He could write a classic originalist opinion tracing the right to bear arms during Reconstruction, and find that it applies to the State.

Finally, fellow Volokh conspirator Randy Barnett (and Cato senior fellow) also disagrees with Orin, offering this perspective:

When choosing between the two pending cases in the Seventh Circuit, why would four Justices grant cert on the McDonald case in which the challenge was focused on the Privileges or Immunities Clause and deny cert on NRA case, which confined its argument to the Due Process Clause? Why would they have rejected the City of Chicago’s proposal which limited the question presented to Due Process?

Faced with this background and the actual question presented, I wonder how would Orin have briefed the case. Would he have offered any of the analysis in his post? Would he have told the Court just to ignore the Privileges or Immunities Clause? Or might he not have assumed as an experienced litigator that the Justices could write a Due Process Clause “incorporation” opinion in their sleep–heck, their clerks could write that opinion in their sleep–and then devoted the bulk of his brief to describing the meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause in context?

Ultimately, Orin’s analysis is based in what he thinks will be the Justices’ dislike for the interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause described in the brief. The conservatives will hate the references to “natural rights” while the liberals will hate the references to “property.” Fair enough. But notice that the brief does not offer Alan Gura’s theory of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. All the phrases to which Orin objects are taken from quotes from the historical sources. Was Gura supposed to conceal these sources from the Court or faithfully report them? Orin may think this case is a hoot, but for the parties and the Court it is serious business.

In short, Orin’s legal realism/conventional wisdom may turn out prescient — and all the rest of us are engaged in a quixotic originalist/libertarian crusade – but I’ll put my money elsewhere.

A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”. Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year. The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon. In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: “I didn’t think for one moment I would be arrested.”

… The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden. In his statement, he said: “I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges. “I didn’t know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him. “At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall.” Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells.

… Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a “strict liability” charge – therefore Mr Clarke’s allegedly honest intent was irrelevant. Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.

… Judge Christopher Critchlow said: “This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge. “The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant.”

There are, to be sure, ways some of these errors could have been avoided. As David Freddoso points out, it would have been trivial to design the backend to only permit legitimate congressional districts to be entered.  But again, getting the site up quickly means they can count on critics to point out those sorts of possibilities for improvement. That said, Freddoso surely has a point when he argues that there’s no sane reason this kludgy beast of a site should have cost $18 million. Far better would have been to take the open-source logic to its conclusion and simply dump the raw data on a server in XML format, then let outside groups—maybe the Sunlight Foundation or Americans for Tax reform or just some clever lone hacker—figure out how best to mash it up and present it.

Not yet a year into his administration, Obama's record on 10th Amendment issues is already clear: He'll let the states have their way when their policies please blue team sensibilities and he'll call in the feds when they don't. Thus, he'll grant California a waiver to allow it to raise auto emissions standards, but he'll bring the hammer down when the state tries to cut payments to unionized health care workers.

That's not how it's supposed to work. As Madison explained in Federalist 45, the powers delegated to the federal government were "few and defined," to be exercised mainly on "external objects" like foreign policy and international trade. All else — criminal law, marriage, social policy — remained with the states or the people.

Of course, No. 45 also contains one of the Federalist's saddest sentences, in which Madison predicts that federal tax collectors will be "principally on the seacoast, and not very numerous." (Sometimes the Framers weren't all that prescient.)

Indeed, the federal government's massive power to tax and spend has increasingly allowed it to trample state prerogatives. As the $786 billion stimulus package came online this year, for the first time ever, federal aid surpassed the sales tax as the largest source of revenue for the states.

"This money isn't manna from heaven," warned Indiana state Sen. Jim Buck, "it comes with a price."

California learned that lesson back in May. Struggling to close a $40 billion budget gap, the state government lowered payments to home health care workers, but the Obama team threatened to withhold billions of dollars in stimulus money unless the wage subsidies were restored.

Officials in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office accused the Service Employees International Union, a longtime Obama ally, of improper influence.

Just a few years back, the Republicans — nominally the party of federalism — were busily wielding federal power to enforce red state values — prosecuting medical marijuana patients, punishing doctors participating in Oregon's "Death with Dignity" initiative, and trying to overturn Florida court decisions that allowed Terry Schiavo to be removed from life support. In that odd political climate, you often heard liberals lamenting the decline of states' rights.

That strange new respect for the 10th Amendment lasted roughly as long as the blue team's exile from power.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said recently that "if we accomplish one thing in the coming years, it should be to eliminate the extreme variation in standards across America." Diversity is bad, uniformity double-plus good; get with the program, comrade.

But one of federalism's core virtues is the enormous diversity it allows. Decentralization makes it easier for Americans to escape unwelcome state experiments with fiscal and social policy.

It enhances the political power of individual citizens by allowing important decisions of governance to be settled closest to where Americans live and work. And it avoids making politics a centralized war of all against all, where each contested issue is settled in a one-size-fits-all fashion at the level furthest from the people.

Our federal system shouldn't be a red team/blue team issue, respected or flouted depending on who's up and who's down. Conservatives are learning to rue their abandonment of federalist principles during the last administration; liberals may come to regret their rush toward centralization during the next.

Not every sector. Just

• health care
• energy
• local schools
• banks
• insurance companies
• automobile companies
• compensation at financial firms
• newspapers
• the internet

And now check out the lead story in Sunday’s Washington Post:

Federal Oversight of Subways Proposed

The Obama administration will propose that the federal government take over safety regulation of the nation’s subway and light-rail systems, responding to what it says is haphazard and ineffective oversight by state agencies.

Not everything. But more and more. So much that even the growing opposition can’t keep up with it all.

If you’re a progressive like me, and you’re upset by the Stupak amendment, which bars federally subsidized insurance from covering abortions, consider this: What if we had a single-payer health-care system and someone like Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin were running the country?

She worries that if Republicans were in charge of government-run health care, they might not stop with abortion. They might try to limit government-paid access to birth control, fertility treatments, or end-of-life care. They might even (gasp) try to require co-pays to get people to take some responsibility for their health-care decisions. She goes on:

I strongly support increasing our government’s involvement in the health-care system by including a public option in the reform package. I believe that if Congress passes legislation that includes a public option, that option will be stronger than many pundits suggest. Such a plan could help lower costs while lifting the quality of care, and would provide serious competition to private insurers.

But I’m also wary that in four or eight years, someone else — someone less sympathetic to my views — may be in the White House. And conservatives could once again control Congress. So I am relieved that we don’t seem to be headed toward a single-payer system. We simply cannot count on “good government” overseeing our health care. One never knows who the American people will choose to elect. As a progressive, I have been stunned by the people’s pick more than once in the past 30 years. Democracy offers choices but makes no promises.

So I want to hedge my bets. I want alternative insurance options, especially from nonprofits such as Kaiser Permanente. And I don’t want to find myself locked into an insurance plan run by conservatives — or Democrats — who feel they have a right to impose their religious beliefs on my access to care.

It’s a good point. I made the same point a week ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

If you still have warm feelings toward Obama and his good intentions, ask yourself this: Will you feel comfortable one day when the appointees of President Romney or President Palin are exercising unconstitutional, unauthorized, unreviewable authority to restructure the economy the way they see fit?

And Bob Levy made the same point to Republicans when they were in power:

advocates of expanded executive power remind civil libertarians that President Bush is an honorable man who understands that the Constitution is made of more than tissue paper. That argument is simply not persuasive – even to those who fervently share its underlying premise. The policies that are put in place by this administration are precedent-setting. Bush supporters need to reflect on the same powers in the hands of his predecessor or his successors.

Indeed, because Republicans are often known as the Stupid Party, and not without reason, I tried to warn them about giving more power to the government while President Clinton was in office:

Let’s not forget that if, say, Coats’s Maternity Shelter Act were implemented next year, Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and human services, would be charged with implementing it. She might appoint HUD assistant secretary Andrew Cuomo to run it, or maybe unemployed ex-congressman Mel Reynolds, or maybe just some Harvard professor who thinks single motherhood is a viable lifestyle option for poor young women. One reason conservatives shouldn’t set up well-intentioned government programs is that they won’t always be in power to run them.

But they never listen. When the Republicans were in power, they brushed aside reminders that some day a Democratic president would be exercising the vast powers that Bush was accumulating in the White House. And when Democrats are in power, they ignore the risks of giving more power to a federal government that will one day be run by conservatives. And then both sides are appalled by the uses that are made of those powers when that day comes.

I guess that’s why the first section of The Libertarian Reader is titled “Skepticism about Power.”

Former President George W. Bush said Thursday that America must resist the “temptation” to allow the government to take over the private sector, taking a subtle shot at his Democratic successor by warning that too much state intervention and protectionism will squelch the economic recovery.

As the Obama administration has made far-reaching moves into the auto, real estate, health care and financial sectors to fight the economic recession, Mr. Bush, without mentioning the president by name, said, “The role of government is not to create wealth but to create the conditions that allow entrepreneurs and innovators to thrive.

“As the world recovers, we will face a temptation to replace the risk-and-reward model of the private sector with the blunt instruments of government spending and control. History shows that the greater threat to prosperity is not too little government involvement, but too much,” said Mr. Bush, who has remained out of the limelight since leaving office and rarely criticizes his successor.

Mr. Bush has addressed private groups since leaving the White House in January, but Thursday’s speech, delivered at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was his first major public policy address since leaving office

Mr. Big Spender, aka George “ break the budget, expand Medicare, centralize control of education in Washington, bail out anyone and everyone, violate civil liberties, treat the president as an elective dictator, and initiate a needless war” Bush, is worried about government doing too much.

I can’t take it any more.  I’ve been working in Washington too long.

said Thursday that America must resist the “temptation” to allow the government to take over the private sector, taking a subtle shot at his Democratic successor by warning that too much state intervention and protectionism will squelch the economic recovery…

“As the world recovers, we will face a temptation to replace the risk-and-reward model of the private sector with the blunt instruments of government spending and control. History shows that the greater threat to prosperity is not too little government involvement, but too much,” said Mr. Bush.

Um, what? The president who

• expanded federal spending by more than a trillion dollars a year, before his disastrous last hundred days
• federalized education
• laid out “a smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington.”
• protected the steel, agriculture, and textile industries from foreign competition
• backed farm bills with lavish subsidies for producers
• created the biggest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson
• bailed out Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, and dozens of other banks
• provided government support for mortgages, credit cards, auto loans and other consumer debt, and
• bailed out Chrysler and General Motors in direct defiance of Congress’s refusal to do so

now says that his successor is about to “replace the risk-and-reward model of the private sector” with “too much government involvement”? Shouldn’t President Bush be doing penance in a monastery somewhere, rather than embarrass the free-market cause by pretending that he wasn’t the biggest-government president in decades?

Whatever your views on abortion, the fight over abortion in the Obama health plan illustrates perfectly why government should stay out of health care.

When the government subsidizes health care, anything you do with that money becomes the voters' business. And rather than allow for choice between different ways of doing things, the government typically imposes the preferences of the majority — or sometimes, a vocal minority — on everybody.

On Saturday, the House of Representatives passed their version of President Obama's health care overhaul. Among other things, the legislation would subsidize private health insurance for millions of Americans.

To appease pro-life Democrats, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) allowed them to insert an amendment to prohibit taxpayer dollars from touching any health insurance plan that covers abortion. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) says the bill would have come up 10 votes short without it.

The amendment incensed pro-choice Democrats. The bill's subsidies would be so pervasive that prohibiting the use of taxpayer dollars for abortion coverage would restrict access to such coverage even for women who don't use the subsidies. Rep. Diana DeGette (Colo.) says she and 40 other pro-choice Democrats "are not going to let this into law."

Democratic leaders are searching for a compromise, but there is no way to split the baby here. Either the government will force taxpayers to fund abortions, or the restrictions necessary to prevent taxpayer funding will reduce access to abortion coverage. There is no middle ground. Somebody has to lose. Welcome to government-run health care.

The same thing happens, in all areas of health care, whenever government foots the bill. Do you think chiropractic is nonsense? Too bad, the government forces you to pay for it through Medicare.

Faith healing seem like quackery too you? Sorry, Charlie. Medicare and Medicaid force you to pay for faith healers at prices "comparable with those of real health care providers," according to law professors David Hyman and Charles Silver.

The problem extends far beyond those trivial examples. The government uses price and exchange controls to pay health care providers. We call those controls Medicare's "fee-for-service payment system" in polite company. Yet the effects are anything but genteel.

Researchers believe Medicare's exchange controls encourage unnecessary services, which account for at least one third of its $430 billion budget, according to the Dartmouth Atlas. Those controls actually penalize doctors and hospitals that coordinate care, use electronic medical records, or try to reduce the estimated 100,000 annual deaths due to medical errors. Congress has "reformed" Medicare's exchange controls approximately once in the program's 43-year history, with a "payment system" that encourages an estimated $12 billion of avoidable hospitalizations per year.

President Obama's economic advisor Larry Summers sums it up: "Price and exchange controls inevitably create harmful economic distortions. Both the distortions and the economic damage get worse with time."

Should grandma want to escape Medicare's price and exchange controls — if she would rather see a doctor that operates under less-perverse financial incentives — too bad. If she would prefer a smaller network of doctors that provides safer, more convenient, coordinated care, she's out of luck. The choice of what kind of medicine she receives belongs to the majority, or a vocal minority.

To be fair, the Medicare Advantage program allows some seniors to escape the traditional Medicare program's price and exchange controls. But Medicare Advantage has its own perversities, thanks to a separate price-and-exchange-control scheme the government uses to pay participating insurers. And in keeping with the overall hypothesis, Democrats are trying to eliminate Medicare Advantage, anyway.

Pro-choice Democrats want to preserve access to private abortion coverage. Pro-life Democrats want to preserve the right to choose whether to fund abortions. Fair enough. But any vote for government subsidies is a vote against choice.

Get government out of health care, and you'll be able to make choices for yourself. Not before.

WARNINGS:

•This product will increase your health insurance premiums. Millions who are satisfied with their current, low-cost health plans would have to switch to more expensive plans, solely because Congress decided they weren't buying enough coverage.

The legislation would increase premiums even further over time, as drug companies, chiropractors, acupuncturists, fertility specialists and other special interests lobby Congress to force you to purchase coverage for their services too.

•This product will reduce the quality of your health care. America's health care sector is often inconvenient, poorly coordinated, and makes less use of information technology than your local supermarket. Research shows that medical errors kill as many as 100,000 Americans per year.

Markets would solve those problems, but government thwarts doctors and entrepreneurs who try to improve quality. Medicare — by far the largest purchaser of medical services in the world — actually penalizes doctors and hospitals that reduce medical errors.

The House bill would cement those deficiencies in place with yet another massive government program, and create new quality problems, like insurers skimping on care and customer service for the sickest patients.

•This product probably won't make you healthier. The House bill would expand coverage, but at a steep cost and with zero evidence that doing so is a cost-effective way of improving health.

Little research supports the notion that broadly expanding insurance coverage makes people healthier. Medicare established near-universal coverage for the elderly, yet research shows that program didn't save a single life in its first 10 years of operation. Whether it has had any subsequent impact on mortality rates — positive or negative — remains an open question.

•This product will make you poorer. The House bill contains at least $2 trillion in explicit and implicit taxes. Tax rates for wealthy Americans would rise to 45 percent, with an ever-expanding definition of "wealthy." For the middle class, effective tax rates would average 60 percent to 70 percent and exceed 100 percent in some cases.

•This product will make your children poorer. Since the bill would actually increase the federal budget deficit, the tax burden would grow over time.

The bill purports to cut Medicare spending, but those cuts are not likely to happen. Want proof? At the same time House Democrats promise future spending cuts, they are gutting $210 billion of spending cuts promised by past Congresses.

And like most government health care programs, this bill's actual costs will exceed current projections. In 1967, Congress predicted that Medicare would cost $12 billion in 1990. Medicare's actual cost that year was $110 billion. Oops.

When this bill causes the deficit to explode, Congress will come after your children's paychecks. Congress has increased Medicare taxes on average once every four years — and Medicare's still $90 trillion in the hole. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, suggests that maybe Congress should impose a European-style value-added tax.

•This product will make you irrational. Spending other people's money has a way of making people nutty. Pelosi thinks that under her legislation, "There is a cap on what you pay in but there is no cap on the benefits that you receive." Limited costs, but unlimited benefits? Really?

After a few years of Pelosicare, you yourself may vote both to eliminate wasteful health care spending and to protect all existing hospitals and doctors' jobs. And you'll wonder why Congress can't do both!

But hey, why not be irrational? Socialized medicine socializes the cost of that, too.

•This product will make you resent immigrants. The House bill would offer hidden subsidies to undocumented immigrants in a new national health insurance "exchange." Turning America's health care sector into a welfare magnet for immigrants will fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. Pretty soon, we're France — in more ways than one.

•This product will make you feel like you're being watched. When taken in combination with its Senate counterpart, the bill would create a national identification system to monitor compliance with its mandates and determine eligibility for its subsidies. With the ability to collect data on every American, the government will always find new uses for any national ID system.

The Pelosi bill is neither safe nor effective. If it were medicine, the Food and Drug Administration would have to ban it.

It turns out that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values, had provided the newspaper, The Daltonian, with a lesson about journalistic independence. Justice Kennedy’s office had insisted on approving any article about a talk he gave to an assembly of Dalton high school students on Oct. 28.

Kathleen Arberg, the court’s public information officer, said Justice Kennedy’s office had made the request to make sure the quotations attributed to him were accurate.

The justice’s office received a draft of the proposed article on Monday and returned it to the newspaper the same day with “a couple of minor tweaks,” Ms. Arberg said. Quotations were “tidied up” to better reflect the meaning the justice had intended to convey, she said.

I’m all for being tidy — and, for all his faults, Kennedy has indeed been friendly to the First Amendment (if not to student speech rights in the “Bong Hits for Jesus” case, Morse v. Frederick) – but public figures don’t usually get to change a story to “better reflect” the intent of their words.

…Frank D. LoMonte, the executive director of the Student Press Law Center, questioned the school’s approach. “Obviously, in the professional world, it would be a nonstarter if a source demanded prior approval of coverage of a speech,” he said. Even at a high school publication, Mr. LoMonte said, the request for prepublication review sent the wrong message and failed to appreciate the sophistication of high school seniors.

While this is hardly a major scandal — and it’s not unusual for justices to exclude the press entirely from public appearances — Kennedy’s use of a judicial editor’s pen does support the general feeling that students don’t always get a fair shake when it comes to their constitutional rights. As I said about an unrelated case in which Cato filed a brief last week (quoting the landmark Tinker case), students shouldn’t have to “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech… at the schoolhouse gate” — especially when a man charged with protecting those rights comes to talk to them about the importance of law and liberty.

H/T: Jonathan Blanks

First, Saturday's House vote was the first time that either chamber of Congress voted — albeit by a razor-thin, three-vote majority — to force all Americans to purchase health insurance.

Second, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., cajoled a majority to vote for the bill, even though a majority of the House does not support it.

Third, Pelosi did all this before the Congressional Budget Office could report that the bill costs far more than supporters claim.

Forcing Americans to purchase health insurance has been a goal of the American left since the Roosevelt administration — that's Teddy, not Franklin.

Despite Weak Support

Though Congress enacted Medicare in 1965, neither chamber had ever voted to force people under age 65 to buy health insurance.

The Clinton health plan would have done so, but it never even came up for a vote.

That makes Saturday's vote historic, especially since the House bill is more radical than the Clinton plan. It would not only make health insurance compulsory, but would also create a government program — the public option — that supporters hope will displace private health insurance.

One might expect such a radical bill to lack majority support — and indeed it does. According to public opinion polls, most of the public opposes it, as do most House members.

Pelosi got a majority of the House to vote for it anyway. Some moderate Democrats, like Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, fear the enormous cost, but voted aye just to keep the process moving.

Unknown Cost

More important, some 40 pro-choice Democrats voted for the bill, and then immediately vowed to kill it. They object to an amendment offered by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and inserted on the House floor that they say would restrict a woman's freedom to purchase private abortion coverage with her own money.

Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., says, "We're not going to let this into law."

Very few of those 40 members would need to switch their votes to wipe out PelosiCare's three-vote margin of victory when the bill comes back to the House for final passage.

But if Democratic leaders alter the Stupak amendment, a similar number of pro-life Democrats (and the bill's lone Republican supporter) say they will kill the bill.

In other words, Pelosi assembled a three-vote majority for the idea of a health care overhaul, but there may be no bill that could command a majority for final passage.

If Saturday's vote had sent the bill to the president rather than the Senate, the outcome likely would have been different. And there's even more to come that could disrupt that narrow majority.

Pelosi brought the bill to a vote before the CBO could estimate the costs it would impose on the private sector.

The CBO has estimated only the on-budget costs to the federal government ($1.3 trillion) and state governments ($34 billion).

If Congress forces people to purchase health insurance, that mandate imposes further costs on individuals and employers.

Federal law requires the CBO to estimate the cost of any private-sector mandates that exceed $139 million per year, but the agency has yet to do so.

Its only statement on the issue, which came the day before the House vote, is that the bill's private-sector mandates "would greatly exceed" that threshold.

Reckless Lawmaking

Indeed, if history is any guide, the private-sector mandates will double the cost of the bill.

In both the Clinton health plan and the Massachusetts health plan, similar mandates accounted for 60% of total costs, according to the CBO and the Massachusetts Taxpayer's Foundation, respectively.

In the coming weeks, then, we can expect the CBO to report that the total cost of the House bill is not $1 trillion, but in the $2 trillion to $3 trillion range.

Holding the vote before that number becomes public was an impressive feat, though not exactly responsible governance.

To use a technical phrase, this is hogwash. This new 6-1/2 minute video, narrated by yours truly, gives 12 reasons why Obamacare will lead to higher deficits – including real-world evidence showing how Medicare and Medicaid are much more costly than originally projected.

By the way, this video doesn’t even touch on the mandate issue, which Michael Cannon explains is not being counted in order to make the cost of government-run healthcare less shocking.

Either those taxpayer dollars will fund abortions, or the restrictions necessary to prevent taxpayer funding will curtail access to private abortion coverage. There is no middle ground.

Thus both sides’ fears are justified. Both sides of the abortion debate are learning why government should not subsidize health care. Tip of the hat to President Obama for creating this teachable moment.

Meanwhile, Catholics should be outraged at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (to which my grandfather served as counsel). Yes, the USCCB helped prevent taxpayer funding of abortions in the House bill. But at the same time, those naughty bishops have abandoned the Church’s doctrine of subsidiarity by endorsing the rest of the Democrats’ plan to centralize power in Washington.

As it happens, Caesar is the main source of funding for Catholic hospitals. That may explain why the bishops are so eager to render unto, ahem, Him.

Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.

Wrote Greenspan: "Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I'm only half joking."

It's no laughing matter. After all, what sort of person wants the job badly enough to spend years living out of a suitcase, begging for cash, glad-handing through primary states, and saying things that no intelligent person could possibly believe?

Greenspan's point was that people who seek the presidency today display a pathological power lust that ought to make us uncomfortable, given the powers the modern president enjoys.

George Washington was called "the American Cincinnatus," after the Roman hero who took power reluctantly and returned humbly to his plow when crisis passed. That's the model Americans once expected presidents to follow. Things have changed, and not for the better.

The last candidate to pay tribute to the Cincinnatus model was 1996 GOP contender Bob Dole, who praised the virtues of his birthplace, Russell, Kan., insisting it was either the White House or "home." It turned out that Dole left "home" deliberately vague. After losing, he returned to his condo at the Watergate, making bucks as a lobbyist and Viagra pitchman.

As for the current POTUS, "he's always wanted to be president," according to Obama's longtime friend and advisor Valerie Jarrett. No surprise, then, that, as Newsweek editor Jon Meacham put it in a profile of Obama earlier this year, he "likes and enjoys power," even "revels" in it.

In a fascinating article, presidential scholar Richard Ellis writes that "in the beginning, the presidency was envisioned not as an office to be enjoyed but as a place of stern duty." "Powerful cultural norms" told 19th-century presidents to approach the role humbly, with a keen awareness that power corrupts.

In public and in private, early presidents often acknowledged their deficiencies. "No event could have filled me with greater anxieties," Washington said of his election. Likewise, in his first inaugural, Jefferson worried that the task he'd undertaken was "above my talents."

Today, Ellis explains, the public demands greater confidence from presidential aspirants. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tells us that when he congratulated Barack Obama for a "particularly fine" speech Obama made as a freshman senator, Obama "said quietly, 'I have a gift, Harry.'"

Reid reports that Obama said that with "deep humility." We'll have to take his word for it.

Calvin Coolidge, a genuinely humble man and a fine president, wrote in his autobiography that it was "a major source of safety to the country" for the president "to know that he is not a great man." Few of our recent presidents display Coolidge's self-awareness.

Newsweek's Meacham reports that Barack Obama relishes "the capacity to shape reality in his image and by his lights." An interesting phrase, that — reminiscent of the Bush aide who bragged to reporter Ron Suskind that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

And yet, as we learned during the Bush years, reality has a way of fighting back.

Obama's supporters have embraced the epithet Suskind's source coined. They fancy themselves members of the "reality-based community." Yet they doggedly defend a president for whom the word "hubris" might have been invented — one who thinks that the government, under his direction, can rationally reshape the one-sixth of the U.S. economy devoted to health care.

Our president describes his budget as a "blueprint" for America's future, and believes that, with the proper mix of social workers and soldiers, we can bring orderly governance to Afghanistan, which has never enjoyed it.

We'd do far better if our presidents had Coolidge's sense of his own limitations and of government's as well.

It's easy enough to blame the overconfident, self-aggrandizing characters who seek the office. But at the end of the day, we're the ones who reward them. Unless and until we seek out candidates who share Coolidge's modesty, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.

The private homes that New London, Conn., took away from Suzette Kelo and her neighbors have been torn down. Their former site is a wasteland of fields of weeds, a monument to the power of eminent domain.

But now Pfizer, the drug company whose neighboring research facility had been the original cause of the homes’ seizure, has just announced that it is closing up shop in New London.

To lure those jobs to New London a decade ago, the local government promised to demolish the older residential neighborhood adjacent to the land Pfizer was buying for next-to-nothing. Suzette Kelo fought the taking to the Supreme Court, and lost. Five justices found this redevelopment met the constitutional hurdle of “public use.”

That this purported “public use” is now exposed as the façade for corporate welfare that it always was is, of course, little comfort to Suzette Kelo and the other homeowners whose land was seized. But hopefully this will be an object lesson for other companies considering eminent domain abuse as a route to acquire land on the cheap — and especially for state and local officials who acquiesce in this type of behavior.

You can read Cato’s amicus brief for the ill-fated case here. Cato also hosted a book forum for the story of Suzette’s struggle, Little Pink House, featuring the author, Jeff Benedict, the attorney who argued the case, the Institute for Justice’s Scott Bullock, and Ms. Kelo herself, here.

HT: Jonathan Blanks

When President Obama decided to convert George W. Bush’s bailout of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler L.L.C. into effective government ownership, critics warned that this could lead to political intrusion into the management of automobile companies, with decisions being made for political instead of economic reasons. The companies would get less efficient. The government might try to preserve jobs or engage in political grandstanding rather than build sound companies that serve consumers – eventually.

But there was no “eventually” about it. Before he had even secured government control, Obama fired the chief executive officer of General Motors. He decided what the ownership structure of the companies should be. He insisted that the companies build “clean cars” rather than cars that consumers want to buy. And as soon as a deal was concluded, members of Congress started trying to block the closing of inefficient dealerships and to require the companies to buy their palladium in Montana, use unionized trucking companies, remove mercury from scrapped cars, and so on. Politics reared its ugly head in the first moments of government control.

Now we have the federal government’s unprecedented intrusions into executive-pay decisions at seven bailed-out banks and automobile companies….

Read more at today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he has said.

Yet it's hard to see the 1,994-page bill that the House passed last night as anything else. After all, the bill uses the command "shall" -- as in "you shall do this," "businesses shall do that" and "government shall do some other thing" -- 3,345 times.

Not a great deal of choice or options there.

To make sure that we obey these "shalls," the bill would create 111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies -- all overseen by a new health-care czar bearing the Orwellian title "commissioner of health choices."

All this would come at a true cost of more than $1.3 trillion over 10 years. And virtually every aspect of health care would be subject to federal regulation.

For example, the government would force every American to buy health insurance and would control what benefits those policies must include. Even those who now have health plans and are happy with them would have to switch to policies that include the government-required benefits -- insurance that might well be more expensive, thanks to the new benefits you won't get to choose.

Another mandate would require that even small businesses provide their workers with a government-devised minimum package of insurance benefits. This could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs -- and force some workers to accept insurance benefits rather than higher wages.

Those insurance products that now give Americans the most choice and flexibility would be severely restricted. Health-savings accounts would be almost eliminated and Flexible Spending Accounts cut back.

Even if the final bill doesn't include the so-called public option, private insurance would be so regulated as to become little more than a public utility, operating much like the electric company, with the government regulating nearly every aspect of its operation.

And the public option itself holds the potential for driving most private insurance out of business, with millions of American workers dumped into the government-run program.

Programs like Medicaid, meanwhile, would be dramatically expanded, and federal subsidies would be extended to people earning as much as 400 percent above the poverty level (or $88,000 a year for a family of four), putting millions more Americans on a form of the dole.

Doctors, too, would find themselves micromanaged from Washington. For example, providers who perform too many tests or procedures would see their Medicare reimbursements cut.

That means every time a doctor decides on a treatment, he or she would have to ask: "Does the government think I'm doing this too much? Will I be penalized if I order this test?"

The government would also undertake comparative- and cost-effectiveness research and use the results to impose practice guidelines on providers.

Medicare would see even more micromanagement, as the government develops a "high value" reimbursement system by 2012. (Many "reform" supporters hope to see these guidelines extended to nongovernment insurance as well.)

Finally, Americans would have to pay nearly $730 billion in new taxes, fees and penalties over the next 10 years to fund this huge government expansion.

No doubt, we do need to fix the problems in our health-care system, but health care represents one-sixth of the US economy -- and some of the most important personal and private decisions in our lives.

Given that the government has mismanaged everything from "cash for clunkers" to the swine-flu vaccine (not to mention the Iraq war and the response to Hurricane Katrina), how much of our health-care system do we really want it to control?

Young adults make up just 17% of the population but account for 31% of the uninsured. The legislation before Congress would force young adults to purchase health insurance at prices far higher than the market would charge. The legislation would use that hidden tax to reduce premiums for their parents, who typically have higher incomes.

We can see how the Democrats' legislation would work by comparing premiums in California and New York. Like that legislation, New York requires insurers to charge young adults the same premiums as older adults. California does not.

According to eHealthInsurance.com, the median premium for a 25-year-old in New York is around three times as expensive as in California ($410 versus $134 a month). In addition, young adults living in California can choose from nearly 10 times as many health plans.

Since about one-third of young adults already reject health insurance at current prices, even more of them would avoid coverage if Congress drives those prices higher. Congress anticipates that response. Each bill includes an "individual mandate," which would force U.S. residents to purchase health insurance, whether they want it or not, on penalty of fines or imprisonment.

Why would Congress compel young adults to purchase health insurance they don't want to buy, at prices higher than they have already rejected? There are at least four possible reasons.

First, young adults may be unaware that insurance in the individual market is really quite affordable. Yet profit-maximizing private insurers have every incentive to communicate that information.

Second is the legitimate concern that the uninsured impose costs on the rest of us when they need medical care and can't pay their bills. But that cannot justify such a mandate, because those costs are a trivial 2.2% of total health care spending. Indeed, MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber and others find that the uninsured as a group pay more for their care than those with health insurance.

Third, lawmakers may consider it "wrong" that young adults prefer to spend their money on mobile phones and lattes instead of health insurance. Simply put, Congress may believe that young adults are ignorant or stupid - which is reflected in labeling catastrophic plans as "young invincible" plans. (Ironically, many older adults have themselves not purchased life insurance, disability insurance, or long-term care insurance - all key elements of responsible financial planning.)

If lawmakers' only motivation were the belief that young adults are stupid, they would simply require young adults to purchase coverage at prevailing prices. Economists Kate Bundorf of Stanford University and Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania estimate that one-quarter to three-quarters of the estimated 46 million uninsured Americans could afford coverage if they wanted it. In California, most young adults likely would qualify for and could afford the inexpensive plans on eHealthInsurance, with premiums as low as $672 per year.

A fourth reason is to redistribute income from young adults to older adults. Forcing young adults to purchase health insurance, and forcing them to pay actuarially unfair premiums, effectively taxes the young to subsidize the old. Never mind that median family income for households headed by someone in his 50s ($60,000) is nearly double that for households headed by someone in their 20s ($33,000).

A desire to redistribute income is the only thing that can explain a policy of forcing young adults to pay above-market premiums for health insurance. Gruber estimates that one bill before Congress would charge young adults at least 62% more than those low-cost California plans, even if they qualify for government subsidies. Young adults could end up paying hundreds or thousands of dollars more, many of them for a product they didn't want in the first place.

That would be a curious way for the President to repay some of his biggest supporters.

Let the government run the schools, and it may end up teaching your children values that offend you. Let the government have new powers to fight terrorism, and it may use those extraordinary powers in the pursuit of ordinary crimes. Let the federal government give the states money for highways, and it may eventually use its money to impose its own rules on the states.

In the Obama era, the slippery slope has gone vertical. Instead of "eventually," the feared extensions of government power come immediately.

When President Obama decided to convert George W. Bush's bailout of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler L.L.C. into effective government ownership, critics warned that this could lead to political intrusion into the management of automobile companies, with decisions being made for political instead of economic reasons. The companies would get less efficient. The government might try to preserve jobs or engage in political grandstanding rather than build sound companies that serve consumers - eventually.

But there was no "eventually" about it. Before he had even secured government control, Obama fired the chief executive officer of General Motors. He decided what the ownership structure of the companies should be. He insisted that the companies build "clean cars" rather than cars that consumers want to buy. And as soon as a deal was concluded, members of Congress started trying to block the closing of inefficient dealerships and to require the companies to buy their palladium in Montana, use unionized trucking companies, remove mercury from scrapped cars, and so on. Politics reared its ugly head in the first moments of government control.

Now we have the federal government's unprecedented intrusions into executive-pay decisions at seven bailed-out banks and automobile companies. The Obama administration's "pay czar," unlike most of the so-called White House czars, has an appalling amount of real power. He "has sole discretion to set compensation for the top 25 employees of each of those companies," and his decisions "won't be subject to appeal," according to recent articles in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, respectively. I was appalled when he used that autocratic power to make such sweeping cuts in executive pay.

True, these executives were running their companies with taxpayers' money. Live by the bailout, die by the bailout. If you don't want to make a government salary, don't take government money. It's a bad idea for government to attach strings to its funding, to use its money to impose an agenda, but the reality is that it does. Maybe it's a good lesson for other executives: Don't take government money.

But what about the slippery slope? Well, it went totally vertical. On the very day that the government czar announced that he would cut the pay of companies that received taxpayer bailouts, the Federal Reserve announced that it would start regulating compensation at the thousands of banks that it regulates, as well as American subsidiaries of non-U.S. financial companies. Some state regulators said they planned to issue similar requirements for state-regulated banks not covered by the Fed plan.

All of this is being done without any legitimate power under the Constitution, and much of it without even the authorization of Congress. Congress refused to bail out the auto companies, so Bush did it on his own authority. Congress never authorized the Federal Reserve to regulate the pay of bank employees.

This is not a slippery slope. This is falling off a cliff. As one news story pointed out: "The restrictions were the latest in more than a year's worth of government intervention in matters once considered inviolable aspects of the country's free-market economy and represent a signal moment in the history of the American economic experiment."

Sometimes it's hard to make a case for slippery slopes, because you're trying to oppose an immediate benefit by warning of a future cost. Not this time.

If you put a frog in lukewarm water, and then gradually turn up the temperature to boiling, the frog won't sense the danger, and will eventually be cooked to death, or so the metaphor goes. Throw a frog into boiling water, and it will jump out immediately, rather than be scalded.

People tend to react the same way to new demands by the government. If new powers and restrictions are introduced gradually, they'll get used to each one so that the next one seems no big deal.

In this case, we're being tossed into boiling water. It's time for Americans of left, right, and center to say that this is not the economic system we want. If you still have warm feelings toward Obama and his good intentions, ask yourself this: Will you feel comfortable one day when the appointees of President Romney or President Palin are exercising unconstitutional, unauthorized, unreviewable authority to restructure the economy the way they see fit?

“I won’t be like the House Republicans were, where anything they propose is bad,” said Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax), who like many Democrats says the GOP-led House obstructed the agenda of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D). “If there are areas where we can work things out, I’m ready, willing and able, and so is my caucus.”

But not so fast:

But asked about certain key pieces of McDonnell’s agenda, Saslaw demurred. Selling state-run liquor stores to raise money for transportation, for instance, would sacrifice the annual revenue the stores provide to schools and other purposes, Saslaw said. The Senate’s education committee remains opposed to changing state laws to allow more charter schools, another McDonnell proposal, he said.

No to bipartisan cooperation, no to competition, yes to hoary monopolies. Is that really the rock on which the Democrats want to make their stand as the country’s “implicit libertarian synthesis” yields a “libertarian moment”?

When Democrats announced the bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed the bill cost only-only!-$894 billion over the next ten years. But outside analysts, including the Congressional Budget Office, suggest that the real cost will be far, far higher.

The CBO, for example, points out that the bill would actually increase government spending by slightly more than $1 trillion. Democrats reported a lower "net" number by subtracting revenues from penalties paid by individuals and businesses that fail to comply with the bill's insurance mandate. But even that does not reflect the bill's true cost.

The Democratic leadership simply shifted some of the bill's cost to other bills. For example, for purposes of the health care bill, the Democrats assume that a currently scheduled 21 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements will take affect next year. However, at the same time, they have introduced a separate bill repealing those cuts at a cost of $250 billion, so that cost isn't technically part of health care reform. And your household budget would look so much better if you didn't have to pay your mortgage and car payment. (The Senate just tried to do something similar, only to have the cynical ploy rejected 53-47, with 13 Democrats refusing to play along.)

If you count that cost honestly, the bill's cost rises to nearly $1.3 trillion. And that still understates the bill's cost.

The CBO provides ten year projections of a bill's cost, between 2010 and 2019 in this case. But most provisions of the health bill don't take effect until 2014. So the "10-year" cost projection only includes six years of the bill. Again, consider your household budget. Wouldn't it be great if you could count a whole month's income, but only two weeks expenditures? If we look at the bill more honestly over the first 10 years that the programs are actually in existence, say from 2014 to 2024, it would actually cost more than $2.3 trillion. And, this doesn't include approximately $200 billion in additional spending for public health programs, a reinsurance program for retiree health care, and new preventive care programs that was added to the bill after it was submitted for official "scoring." So call the total cost somewhere in excess of $2.5 trillion.

There has been a lot of talk recently about "bending the curve" of health care spending, but as the actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently noted, the House bill bends the curve in the wrong direction — increasing government health care costs.

All this new spending will be accompanied by equally massive federal tax hikes, roughly $500 billion over the first 10 years, $700 billion if the penalties for failing to comply with the mandate are included.

Furthermore, much of the bill's cost is shifted off the federal books onto businesses, individuals, and state governments. These business and individual mandates are the equivalent of tax increases, but those costs aren't included in the bill's cost estimates. Nor is the cost of increased insurance premiums, though nearly everyone agrees that insurance premiums will go up under reform, especially for younger and healthier people. And state governments will have to pick up at least part of the cost for the bill's Medicaid expansion. In fact, already strapped states could have to come up with as much as $34 billion.

And, it could get worse. The bill promises to pay for part of the cost with $500 billion in cuts to Medicare over the next 10 years. But how likely is it that those cuts take place? After all, this is an administration that is paying seniors $250 to make up for the fact that they didn't get a Social Security cost of living increase this year (because the cost of living didn't increase). And, Congress is in the process of repealing a scheduled increase in Medicare premiums.

If those cuts don't happen, that just means more taxes or more debt passed on to our children and grandchildren.

So far much of the debate over health care reform has been focused on the details of the bill. But, eventually the public is going to notice the price tag. When they do, House Democrats, especially those who claim to be fiscally responsible Blue Dogs, may have a lot of explaining to do.

A billion dollars here, a trillion there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money.

Even deer who weren’t born when barbed wire, watchtowers, and armed guards prevented the natural extension of their happy grazing grounds act as if the Cold War never ended — apparently because they learned their habits from their parents, who learned them from their parents.

Still, as with the new generation of Eastern Europeans who have no memory of Communism, some young deer are starting to break the mold, taking advantage of — and even taking for granted — their newfound freedom.  I wonder if the grass (and ferns, and whatever else deer eat) is any greener on the other side of the former Iron Curtain.