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.

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?

"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?

Today, it is difficult to find non-interventionists in either party.

The Democrats demonstrate a disdain for capitalism, free trade and the validity of contracts. They cheer the restriction of certain types of speech on campus and in federal law, and think nation-building is our moral obligation, even when there is no discernible U.S. interest involved. Lately, the Democrats have been popularly associated with opposition to waging war in far-flung corners of the globe. But evidence on the ground today tells a somewhat different tale.

As for the GOP, it has openly abandoned the limited-government principles of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Little other evidence is needed than the Medicare prescription drug benefit — with its $13-trillion unfunded liability — passed with a strong-arm campaign by the Bush White House and a Republican congressional majority.

What happened to the Republicans? Well, the two Bush presidencies didn't help. Neither did the supply-side movement, focused on tax cuts and economic growth, which is laudable. But supporters of those ideas didn't talk about spending cuts, much less the proper role of government. They had the effect of replacing "liberty" as the motivating force behind the GOP with "growth," a somewhat less inspiring ideal.

But perhaps most pernicious has been the role played by the neoconservatives. The late William F. Buckley used his conservative flagship publication, National Review, to make anti-communism the litmus test for joining the conservative movement. Dealing with the Soviets during the Cold War was clearly an important task, but it should not have opened the door to the limited government movement to the neoconservatives, who always have been advocates of big government. With the neocon foot in the policymaking door after the Cold War ended, the drumbeat for war in Iraq began in earnest a decade before 9/11.

It is important to realize that neocons are not just nation-building, American empire advocates. They like big government across the board. No Child Left Behind, the thinly disguised effort to nationalize education in America, was principally a neocon initiative. Consider this comment from the late Irving Kristol, self-described "godfather" of the neoconservative movement: "Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable." Indeed.

There is an insidious philosophy underlying this acceptance of the "natural" growth of statism. Neoconservative columnist David Brooks wrote in the late 1990s that we need "a vigorous One Nation Conservatism that will connect a revived sense of citizenship with the long-standing national greatness Americans hold dear." In another essay, he wrote, "Ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington ... individual ambition and will power are channeled into the cause of national greatness. And by making the nation great, individuals are able to join their narrow concerns to a larger national project." A frightening worldview.

Which brings us to the war in Afghanistan. The neocons are predictably enthused about the prospect of a prolonged U.S. occupation there. A dozen or so of them recently sent a letter to President Obama urging him to up the ante. Astonishingly, the president who was elected as the anti-war protest candidate appears poised to take the neocons' advice and commit tens of thousands more troops to a conflict in which immediate U.S. interests are unclear at best.

Meanwhile, Obama's domestic agenda is in shambles. Americans are outraged at the prospect of trillion-dollar deficits, auto bailouts and the subsidies to irresponsible bankers. And they don't want socialized medicine.

The "tea parties" and town hall meetings are essentially libertarian. There is no conservative policy agenda, only a demand that the government stop trying to run our lives.

Republicans should take this opportunity to return to their traditional non-interventionist roots, and throw their neoconservative wing under the bus and forcefully oppose the war in Afghanistan. The Republicans have a chance at this moment to reclaim the mantle of the party of non-intervention — in your healthcare, in your wallet, in your lifestyle, and in the affairs of other nations.

In New Jersey, Democratic governor Jon Corzine has done surprisingly well with his "make fun of the fat kid" reelection strategy, yet portly Republican Chris Christie retains a narrow advantage.

In Virginia, the GOP's Bob McDonnell is comfortably ahead in a state that Obama won by over 200,000 votes, and a Sunday poll had Conservative Party upstart Doug Hoffman 16 points ahead of his Democratic opponent in New York's 23rd congressional district.

If history is any guide, Democrats have reason to worry about 2010. In every midterm election but two since the end of WWII, the president's party has lost seats, and it's a fair bet that the Blue Team faces double-digit losses next year.

The "Hopefest 2009" aura surrounding Obama's inauguration reminds us that Americans are still suckers for the romance of Camelot. But though we periodically swoon for heroic presidents who pledge to heal the country and the world, when we sober up, we vote to check the hero's power.

In fact, in the past half century, voters have opted for divided government over 60 percent of the time. We Americans rest easier when the purse and sword are in different hands.

Why shouldn't we, given the horrors of one-party government? Whenever one faction controls both elected branches, checks and balances disappear.

My colleague Bill Niskanen, former chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, points out that since the start of the Cold War, we've had only a dozen years of real fiscal restraint: Six under Eisenhower and a Democratic Congress, and six under Clinton and a GOP majority.

Per Niskanen's calculations, since FDR, unified governments have spent roughly three times as fast as divided ones, and they've been much more likely to waste blood and treasure abroad.

The Framers tried to craft a constitution that gave politicians proper incentives to check each other. "Ambition [would] counteract ambition," as James Madison saw it, with congressmen keeping presidents honest and vice-versa.

Things haven't worked out as planned. Too often, party loyalty trumps constitutional fidelity, as evidenced by former House speaker Denny Hastert's self-image as a "lieutenant" of George Bush rather than a guardian of congressional prerogatives.

But when different parties hold the legislature and the executive, the Madisonian system works better. Divided government leads to many more congressional investigations into presidential misconduct, and, as two University of Chicago scholars demonstrated recently, "the White House's propensity to exercise military force steadily declines as members of the opposition party pick up seats in Congress."

When politicians wax sentimental about "the wisdom of the American people," it's usually a good idea to hold on to your wallet. If we're so smart, who's to blame for the clowns we elect?

But when it comes to separating the purse and the sword, we may be brighter than expected. A good chunk of us deliberately split our tickets. In 2004, two political scientists crunched the numbers, estimating that more than 20 percent of American voters were "cognitive Madisonians." In plain English, these voters consciously tried to "divide power and balance policy."

Even if the "cognitive Madisonians" are energized in 2010, it will be difficult for the GOP to seize the House. As analyst Charlie Cook notes, there are fewer open seats for the taking then there were during the Republican Revolution of '94.

Ironically enough, though, if things were easier for the Republicans, the embattled Obama might have a better shot at a successful presidency. Divided government tends to boost the president's approval rating.

It's no accident that the few modern presidents who left office with high popularity — Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton — had to battle a Congress controlled by the opposition. We tend to like the guy better when he doesn't have a free hand.

No doubt Obama's pulling for Corzine, Deeds, and Owens today, and for a Democratic majority in 2010. But if he knew what was good for him — and for the country — he'd silently root for divided government.

While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans -- hostile or sympathetic -- actually knew little about communism, and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media's fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction.

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.

Communist systems ranged from tiny Albania to gigantic China; from highly industrialized Eastern European countries to underdeveloped African ones. While divergent in many respects, they had in common a reliance on Marxism-Leninism as their source of legitimacy, the one-party system, control over the economy and media, and the presence of a huge political police force. They also shared an ostensible commitment to creating a morally superior human being -- the socialist or communist man.

Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder. People were persecuted not for what they did but for belonging to social categories that made them suspect.

In the aftermath of the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals remain convinced that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long tradition of such animosity among Western intellectuals who gave the benefit of doubt or outright sympathy to political systems that denounced the profit motive and proclaimed their commitment to create a more humane and egalitarian society, and unselfish human beings. The failure of communist systems to improve human nature doesn't mean that all such attempts are doomed, but improvements will be modest and are unlikely to be attained by coercion.

Soviet communism collapsed for many reasons, including the economic inefficiency that resulted in chronic shortages of food and consumer goods, and pervasive and mendacious propaganda, which amounted to the routine misrepresentation of reality highlighting the gap between theory and practice, and promise and fulfillment. The political will of leaders behind the Iron Curtain diminished over time -- in part because of Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 revelations about Joseph Stalin's crimes but also because of their own experiences of the system's flaws. They no longer had the will to crush dissent. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev allowed new revelations of the errors and evils of communism to be aired -- further undermining the legitimacy of communist rule.

The failure of Soviet communism confirms that humans motivated by lofty ideals are capable of inflicting great suffering with a clear conscience. But communism's collapse also suggests that under certain conditions people can tell the difference between right and wrong. The embrace and rejection of communism correspond to the spectrum of attitudes ranging from deluded and destructive idealism to the realization that human nature precludes utopian social arrangements and that the careful balancing of ends and means is the essential precondition of creating and preserving a decent society.

Recently, Sen. Thomas Carper, D-DE, and Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, scoffed at the idea that they should read the health care legislation working its way through Congress (hey, it's only a matter of life and death). That attitude has inspired the "Read to Vote" campaign — designed to get congressmen to pledge to "read every word of every bill before casting my vote."

Read to Vote's efforts earned them a condescending Washington Post editorial last month, complaining that their proposal "would bring government to a standstill." (Heaven forbid.) "To read all 1,427 pages of Waxman-Markey," the Post fretted, "it would take at least 12 hours — tough on a tight legislative timeline."

Is reading the cap and trade bill tough? Tough. If you're planning to regulate every industrial process in America, you may have to do some heavy slogging.

True enough, the bills Congress passes have become increasingly impenetrable over the years. In Abraham Lincoln's first State of the Union, he worried about the growing complexity of federal law, but noted that, with a modest effort at revision, "all the acts of Congress now in force [could fit in] one or two volumes of ordinary and convenient size." Today, the Senate Finance Committee's 1,502-page health-care bill would take up more than that much space by itself.

Worse still, most of the actual "law" in this country — the rules that citizens have to follow, at pain of fine or imprisonment — is generated by unelected administrative agencies, which use broad authority delegated by Congress to add over 75,000 new pages to the Federal Register every year.

It's said that the Roman emperor Caligula posted new laws high on the columns of buildings so citizens couldn't read them and figure out how to avoid their penalties. He could have achieved the same effect by covering the country with such a dense thicket of rules that no one could tell what the law commands.

Legend has it that Caligula also made his favorite horse a senator. Considering how lightly most of our legislators take their constitutional obligations, you could probably do worse.

In February 2003, the New York Times reported that both parties had hired lawyers to run seminars for congressmen, explaining the requirements of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law they had just passed. "I didn't realize what all was in it," said Rep. Robert Matsui (D.-CA); "A real education process," echoed Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R.-NY).

If congressmen can't be bothered to read a law that directly affects them, should we be surprised that they're not planning to read the health care bill, which won't?

But, even assuming we could force legislators to read the bills, would that lead to better government? Maybe not. Carper had a point when he said that modern legislative language "is so arcane, so confusing…[that] it really doesn't make much sense."

If congressmen had to read what they passed, they might draft shorter, more comprehensible bills. But one way to do that is by punting yet more lawmaking authority to the permanent bureaucracy, which can then issue its own mammoth set of unintelligible rules. That hardly solves the problem.

A better idea can be found in a resolution recently introduced by Sen. Jim Bunning, R-KY, requiring all new legislation to be posted online for 72 hours before consideration. That could put the distributed intelligence of the web to work, ferreting out the many devils in the details of proposed laws.

However, that's still just treating symptoms. Federal law has become incomprehensible because Congress has inserted itself into every area of American life. As James Madison explained, though, Congress's constitutional powers are "few and defined…. [to be] exercised principally on external objects," like foreign policy and international trade.

Read the bills? It's more important for congressmen to read the Constitution. They'll be pleased to learn that it's short and written in plain English.

Many who see this situation often blame it on "excessive partisanship," where the real problem is caused by a bipartisan lust for power that breeds too much accommodation, rather than questioning and resistance to bad ideas. The American Founding Fathers understood that a balance of power and endless struggles within government were necessary to preserve individual liberties. Liberties (and economic prosperity) are most endangered when one party and/or an accommodating opposition controls the administration, both houses of Congress, and much of the judiciary.

It is probably no accident that the United States experienced its most recent high growth period in the late 1990s when there was a moderate Democrat in the White House (Bill Clinton) and a very aggressive Republican controlled Congress (Newt Gingrich and company).

During this period, the federal government actually shrank as a share of gross domestic product - which accounted for much of the prosperity. Yet, in just a decade that was mostly characterized by one-party rule - first by the Republicans and then by the Democrats - there has been a record rise in the size of government, not only in absolute but also in relative terms, so the federal government is about one-third larger than it was a decade ago.

The failure of either political party to get serious about reining in the growth of government has caused despair among small government conservatives, libertarians and others who believe in limited government. And this despair is contributing to the list of "destructive solutions" now infecting Washington.

This month, Bruce Bartlett, an early supply-sider, former aide to Jack Kemp - when Kemp was in Congress - and a Treasury official in the first Bush administration, published a new book The New American Economy (Palgrave 2009).

Mr. Bartlett, a friend of three decades, has become so pessimistic because of the growth in government that he now advocates a value added tax (VAT), much as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats have supported.

Mr. Bartlett argues that the failure of both Republicans and Democrats to get serious about government spending and, in particular, curtailing the growth of entitlements - notably, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - means the government must have more revenue, and thus he argues a VAT is the least destructive way of financing the much bigger federal government he thinks is inevitable (even though he would personally prefer a smaller government).

Some of us who disagree with Mr. Bartlett argue that his proposal is a "destructive solution," because any major new tax will slow economic growth even further, making it increasingly likely that government will continue to grow more rapidly than the economy, which eventually will lead to complete economic stagnation or worse. It is not possible to tax a country out of a problem of excess spending growth.

All the bills Congress and the administration are now trying to combine in one health care "reform" bill are "destructive solutions" because they fail to deal with an essential problem of health care, which economic Nobel laureate Vernon L. Smith has put so well: "The health-care provider, A, is in the position of recommending to the patient, B, what B should buy from A. A third party - the insurance company or the government - is paying A for it. The structure defines an incentive nightmare."

Until, the powers in Washington start dealing realistically with health care incentives, health care will become more costly (even if the cost is partially disguised by increased taxes and subsidies). Anyone who thinks any health care proposal that can pass this Congress and (as the president has claimed) will insure the uninsured, reduce costs and not add to the deficit is delusional.

Another example of a currently proposed "destructive solution" is the administration proposal for a resolution authority to unwind large nonbank financial institutions. Peter Wallison, former general counsel of the U.S. Treasury and now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has said it best in his new study. "The plan's fundamental flaw is its failure to explain how this or any other government will distinguish in advance between companies whose failure would cause a systemic breakdown and those whose failure will cause only an economic disruption of some kind. Without a way to make this distinction, the resolution authority will simply become a permanent Troubled Asset Relief Program. Other conceptual flaws in the administration's plan are its effect in creating moral hazard, enhancing the competitive advantages of large nonbank financial firms, increasing the uncertainty faced by creditors of nonbank financial institutions, and adding yet another burden for the taxpayers."

As long as government grows faster than the economy, real problems will only get worse; but once government starts growing slower than the economy (as it did during much of the 1980s and 1990s), many problems just go away or are made manageable. And as other countries have shown, the growth in entitlements can be reduced, and even reversed, when the proper incentives are put in place. The situation will get better when the voters finally say they have had enough and replace most of the current actors in Washington, and when judges start having enough backbone to say to Congress and the administrative agencies, "You cannot do that because a proper reading of the Constitution shows that 'you do not have the authority.'"

But a new study from a prominent Democratic polling firm shows that the Tea Partiers are neither racist nor particularly partisan. What's more, they genuinely support smaller government -- and they're not going away anytime soon.

Last week, Democracy Corps, founded by Clinton vets James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, reported on a recent series of focus groups they held with GOP base voters and conservative-leaning independents.

Hard-core conservatives in the groups expressed an "apocalyptic" view of Obama's agenda not remotely shared by the swing voters. According to Carville/Greenberg, the Republican base stands "a world apart from the rest of America," and that will make it hard for the GOP leadership to appeal to mainstream voters.

Whether that's true or not, the Democracy Corps report provides valuable insight into what's motivating the Tea Party movement: "Fear of government control is at the heart of virtually all of the concerns raised by these voters about Obama's agenda."

True, when President Bush pushed for Medicare Part D, the biggest victory for American "socialism" in nearly 50 years, we didn't see droves of Republicans marching on D.C.

But conservatives in the focus groups said they were "embarrassed" by Bush's presidency, in large part because of "the prescription drug benefit and his failure to rein in spending or the size of government." They had "virtually nothing positive to say about the Republican Party."

One of Carville/Greenberg's main "findings" is that hard-core anti-Obamaites aren't racist -- they're just crazy. (Uh, thanks, I guess). On the first point at least, what they report rings true.

"Get over it," they tell liberals who think racism explains vehement opposition to Obama. "Race was barely raised" in the focus groups, except when some conservatives expressed "feeling some pride at [Obama's] election," and others complained about being labeled racist just for criticizing the president.

That's a legitimate complaint, given some of what's been written about the 9/12 march. In a recent fundraising letter, the Nation described "tens of thousands waving Confederate flags ... and shouting 'White Power!'" Anyone who spent any time at last month's protest knows that's a vicious lie.

Carville and Greenberg score some points when they catalog the silly theories embraced by some conservatives in the focus groups. Some participants obsessed over Obama's birth certificate, suggested that Bill Ayers wrote Obama's books, and insisted that Obama was a "puppet," whose election was engineered by "a hidden set of liberal elites."

At the same time, they complained about a media campaign to "discredit attacks on Obama." But when conservatives traffic in wacky conspiracy theories, they make it easier to discredit legitimate criticism.

Yet some of what Carville and Greenberg offer as evidence of nuttiness makes Tea Partiers seem far saner than the political center. For example, "they believe Obama is pushing his agenda at record pace because he does not want the American people to know what he is doing," and "reject as laughable" the notion that Obamacare won't result in "a government takeover of all aspects of health care." Crazy talk!

Like the song says, "just because you're paranoid/don't mean they're not after you." Given that Obama's chief of staff and his secretary of state have publicly delighted over the fact that a crisis atmosphere makes radical initiatives easier, maybe conservatives can be forgiven their suspicions about the pace of change.

So, too, with their fears of a health care takeover. In a rare candid moment on the campaign trail two years ago, Obama said that he favored "a single-payer system... Over time it may be that we end up transitioning to such a system."

Carville and Greenberg think the GOP's hard-core base presents a major problem for the party. But you can draw other conclusions from their report. According to their data, the conservatives they talked with, who worry about overweening government, represent "almost one in five voters in the electorate." They're here, they fear, get used to it.

And as Obama continues to push for bigger government in the midst of rising opposition, their ranks are likely to grow.

The pathologies of federal spending programs are examined on a new Cato Institute Web site, www.downsizinggovernment.org. Programs in every federal department suffer from fraud, cost overruns, and other types of mismanagement. And many federal programs are ineffective or actually cause damage to society.

Fraud is rife throughout the government's array of 1,800 different subsidy programs, including health programs. For Medicare and Medicaid, as much as 20 percent of spending disappears into a black hole of improper payments, according to Malcolm Sparrow of Harvard University. That amounts to more than $100 billion of annual health spending being essentially flushed down the drain.

Here's one egregious example: Over four years ending in 2008, a high school dropout in Miami with a laptop computer was able to single-handedly cheat Medicare out of $105 million by electronically submitting 140,000 fraudulent claims for equipment and services. With that sort of abuse endemic in federal health programs, do we really want to expand them further?

Another spending pathology is cost overruns. Highway construction, defense procurement, and other federal spending projects often cost far more than budgeted. For example, Boston's Big Dig highway project - which was mainly funded by federal taxpayers - was overwhelmed by poor management and ended up costing five times more than promised.

Cost overruns have also plagued federal health programs. When Medicare's Part A was launched in 1965, it was projected to cost $9 billion by 1990, but ended up costing $67 billion. When Medicare's home-care benefit was added in 1988, it was projected to cost $4 billion in 1993, but ended up costing $10 billion.

It's the same for Medicaid. When that program's special hospitals subsidy was added in 1987, it was supposed to cost $100 million annually, but within five years it was costing $11 billion annually. So when the Democrats today promise that their health-care plan will cost $1 trillion, taxpayers had better hold onto their wallets because it's likely to end up costing much more.

Aside from high costs, many federal programs don't produce the promised results. Let's be bipartisan and pick on a Republican program this time - George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind education plan. Under Bush, federal education spending doubled in eight years, yet U.S. student achievement has generally not improved.

Other programs, while well-intended, have inadvertently created damage to the economy. For years, both Republican and Democratic administrations promoted housing subsidy programs to boost home purchases by high-risk borrowers. But after the recent housing bubble and bust, we now know that those subsidies were a huge mistake.

Federal programs can create social damage as well as economic damage. Consider public housing. The federal government pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into projects over the decades, but the results have often been disastrous. Many housing projects became dens of crime and disorder, and the harmful effects often spread to surrounding neighborhoods. Yet the government still spends billions of dollars a year on public housing.

Some federal subsidy programs harm the environment. Farm subsidies induce farmers to overuse marginal farm land and sugar subsidies spur excessive sugarcane cultivation in Florida, which has damaged the Everglades. And for those who think that big corporations are the worst polluters, they should study the appalling environmental damage done at federal nuclear weapons sites. Taxpayers are spending billions of dollars every year cleaning up that mess.

Perhaps the most serious problem with federal spending is that programs squelch the development of new and diverse solutions to society's problems. In health care, government intrusion has pushed up the cost of private insurance and squeezed out private health alternatives. For example, about half of the elderly already had health insurance before Medicare was enacted in 1965. But Medicare killed that market and also killed any chance that state governments or entrepreneurs would introduce their own health solutions for the elderly.

The men who came to Philadelphia in 1787 to frame a new government believed that federal functions should be "few and defined," with most activities left to the states and the private sector. They didn't believe that one-size-fits-all federal spending programs made sense for a vast and diverse nation.

History has proved them correct. So rather than imposing another grand health-care scheme on the country, federal policymakers should focus on removing obstacles to bottom-up innovations that could more efficiently fix our health-care markets.

There are several ways to see if it is working as advertised. First, what did the proponents say would happen when they were pushing the plan versus what has happened? Second, how has the United States fared compared to other nations that had smaller or no stimulus programs? Third, how have the results to date compared to what pro-stimulus, Keynesian-school economic theorists advocated versus what other theorists (principally Austrian-school) who largely opposed the stimulus plans said?

U.S. unemployment already has reached 9.8 percent, with 15.1 million Americans unemployed, and more than 7.1 million jobs have been eliminated since the beginning of the recession. President Obama's economic advisers said in the beginning of this year that the unemployment rate would rise to 9 percent with no stimulus package and would only rise to a maximum of 7.9 percent with the stimulus bill, peaking during this past summer. Stimulus proponents clearly have failed the first test (despite Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s revisionist statements) and there is zero evidence for their claims that more jobs would have been lost without the stimulus package.

One might argue that the stimulus had worked if the results in the United States were better than in other countries that had smaller or no stimulus packages. The recession has been global, and every country has been affected negatively. Only Great Britain attempted to put in a stimulus package that was relatively as large as the U.S. package. A crude measure of economic stimulus is the size of the deficit relative to gross domestic product. During recessions, tax revenues decline in all countries, so most will run a deficit whether they intend to or not. A stimulus package normally contains a mix of government spending increases and tax cuts, resulting in a deliberately larger deficit.

The United States and Britain have by far and away run the largest deficits as a percentage of GDP (i.e. the most stimulus), yet the U.S. and Britain, along with Italy and Russia, had not bottomed out in second-quarter 2009, while the rest of the 10 largest economies were showing real growth in the second quarter. Russia's poor performance is largely a function of relying very heavily on the export of raw materials rather than developing a broad-based economy as all the others in the Big 10 have done.

The three countries with the smallest deficits (the least stimulus) — Brazil, China and Germany — have all turned the corner rather quickly and are growing. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has just announced she is going to push tax cuts, which should give the German economy an additional shot in the arm.

While the data set is too small with the top 10 countries (which collectively account for a large majority of the world's GDP) to draw definitive conclusions, the existing evidence indicates that a big stimulus package seems to delay recovery, while little stimulus leads to a quick return to economic growth.

Finally, what do the competing economic theorists say? The Keynesians say that if the government increases spending to stimulate demand and create jobs for those who do not have them, this should lead to a less painful downturn and a quicker recovery. The Austrian (aka Hayekians) free-market sorts say recoveries occur on their own once asset and labor prices fall from inflated levels of the previous boom and excess inventories are worked off. This usually happens within 16 months unless government attempts to mitigate these necessary price adjustments, which will delay the recovery. (Apologies to both my Austrian and Keynesian friends for trying to summarize their views in one short paragraph.)

The Keynesians never really get a fair test of their theory because politicians always take the Keynesian notion that it is OK to increase government spending as a license to spend the extra money on themselves and their friends rather than on those who might actually benefit. (This self-dealing process is well explained by the public-choice school of economics.) A few examples from the current stimulus program should suffice. Congress increased spending on itself last year by 10.9 percent and by another 5.8 percent this year for a grand total of $4.7 billion. (Remember, it was just 15 years ago when the Gingrich Republicans ran against the "billion dollar Congress.") Given that the number of members of Congress remains fixed at 535, why should their budget go up any faster than inflation?

Congress and the administration also have gotten into the venture capital business, which enables them to dump infinite quantities of money into their rich friends' pockets. Bill Frezza, a principled venture capitalist, using Fox News and other venues, has been blowing the whistle on these unsavory and destructive practices. Did you know that Al Gore and friends just received almost $600 million to develop another expensive ($88,000) hybrid electric sports car with your tax money? The chances of taxpayers getting their money back are less than of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler paying off all their loans, which is close to zero. Paradise defined: being politically well-connected when stimulus money is around.

The only things one can say for sure about stimulus money is that it will add to the deficit, ultimately driving up interest rates and taxes; and much of it will be wasted and/or stolen, neither of which benefits the unemployed. By any objective measure, the stimulus program has been and will continue to be a failure — but don't expect the Washington politicos ever to admit it.

But shed no tears for Chicago. As a 2006 report from Europe's leading tourism trade association concluded, there's "little evidence of any benefit to tourism from hosting an Olympic Games, and considerable evidence of damage." With a projected half-billion-dollar deficit next year, the Second City is better off without the Games.

We can't say the same for Obama's reputation after his in-person appeal failed to get his adopted hometown past the first round of voting. What new project can the president undertake to save face?

How about ... reforming college football? In a post-election 60 Minutes interview last November, Obama called for selecting the national champion via an eight-team playoff: "I'm going to throw my weight around a little bit. I think it's the right thing to do."

Perhaps those of us who oppose national health care and cap and trade shouldn't complain that the president seems so easily distracted. But you have to wonder: Does Obama think there's anything too frivolous to merit the president's attention?

Obama's failed Olympic gambit was dumb politics. But it's also bad policy for the president to involve himself in nonpresidential issues, reinforcing as it does an infantile and unhealthy view of presidential responsibility.

Obama didn't invent that view of the presidency, he inherited it. Over the course of the 20th century, the public, conditioned by the media's relentless focus on presidential action, came to view the chief executive as a national father-protector, with a purview far broader than the limited role the Constitution sets out for him.

Nor is Obama the first president to involve himself in minutia. In his 2004 State of the Union, for example, President George W. Bush urged major-league baseball and football to "get tough, and get rid of steroids now."

And Bush periodically played the role of national fitness coach, meeting with food company executives to hammer out "a coherent strategy to help folks all throughout our country cope with" childhood obesity.

Faithfully executing the laws, protecting the country from foreign attack — and helping Americans "cope" with their kids' Dorito cravings — the president's portfolio is vast indeed.

But Obama has forged new frontiers in triviality. He's the president of all things great and small: He calls for "a cure for cancer in our time" while also promising to stand behind the warranty on your new Ford Fusion.

With the two wars he's running and his ceaseless efforts to micromanage the U.S. economy, you'd think he'd have plenty to do. But in his televised speech to America's schoolchildren last month Obama took time out to urge students "to stand up for kids who are being teased" and "wash your hands a lot."

He just can't help himself. Six months into his presidency, the Politico reported, Obama had already "uttered more than half a million words in public." In one whirlwind week last month, the president made his third appearance on "60 Minutes," gave a major speech on the financial crisis the next day, and made a record five talk-show appearances the following Sunday. And on the eighth day, he did Letterman.

Obama's incontinent approach to presidential responsibility doesn't seem to be helping him politically, however. August was the toughest month of his young presidency, and it began with the ridiculous "beer summit," in which the president gratuitously injected himself into a disputed arrest by a local cop in Cambridge, Mass.

Given how much bloom has come off the rose since then, Obama's decision to stake some prestige on securing the Olympics is baffling. What was the point of getting himself into an irrelevant fight that he might well lose?

More importantly, why would Obama go out of his way to encourage the public's irrationally broad view of presidential responsibility? Isn't the president's job hard enough?

Obama has become the omnipresent omnipresident. But a man who is everywhere, promising to do everything, may end up accomplishing very little, and he's sure to disappoint.

Having helped oust Van Jones, Obama's "green jobs" czar, Fox News' Sean Hannity swears that he won't rest until he's gotten "rid of every other one." But if he succeeds, will the country be appreciably freer, or the government noticeably smaller?

No, it won't, because the conservatives' current bout of czar mania elevates symbolism over substance. All the focus on a scary moniker for certain executive officials misses the real problem: Unconstitutional delegation of power to the executive branch. Whether those illegitimate powers are exercised by unconfirmed presidential advisers or the president himself is quite beside the point.

Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., notes that you won't find the word "czar" in the Constitution; but you won't find it in federal law either. That's because "czar" is a media-coined, catchall term for presidential assistants tasked with coordinating policy on issues that cut across departmental lines.

Officials dubbed "czars" range from the truly powerful, like Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, to the ineffectual such as cybersecurity czar Melissa Hathaway, who quit last month because she lacked real authority.

Often, czars are mere figureheads, appointed to signal concern over the latest hot-button issue. As one presidential scholar puts it, "when in doubt, create a czar."

True, it's problematic that some of these appointees aren't vetted by the Senate, and that presidents claim czars don't have to answer to Congress — as when the Bush administration asserted in 2002 that executive privilege shielded then-homeland security czar Tom Ridge from testifying on the Hill.

But as the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel has pointed out, many of the "czars" who appear on the conservative target list already have to be confirmed by the Senate. Others don't, but when Obama is hell-bent on taking over the health care sector — one-sixth of the U.S. economy — it's bizarre to agonize over the allegedly unchecked power exercised by the likes of the AIDS and urban affairs czars.

Similarly, while it's great to see a 9/11 "Truther" like Van Jones denied a federal salary, few of those cheering Jones' defenestration can coherently explain what the green jobs czar actually does, or the threat he was supposed to represent.

What, was Jones going to give 9/11 "Truthers" and black nationalists jobs weatherizing homes? Will we stop wasting money on such projects now that he's gone?

In contrast, the "pay czar" and the "car czar" have considerable power, and such offices have no place in a free country. But it was Obama himself, not his car czar, who summarily fired the chief executive officer of General Motors. Is that power less disturbing when it's exercised directly by the president, rather than delegated to a so-called "czar"?

Blame Congress. The "pay czar" grew out of a provision Congress passed with the stimulus package, ordering the Treasury Department to come up with rules on executive compensation for firms taking Troubled Assets Relief Program money.

The auto bailout itself is a result of congressional fecklessness. Many in Congress protested when President George W. Bush used the TARP statute to lend billions to Chrysler and GM. How, they asked, could that possibly be authorized by a law allowing the purchase of "troubled assets" from "financial institutions"?

If they'd bothered to read the bill, they'd know. Those terms were so loosely defined in the statute that they gave Bush and Obama a colorable argument for reshaping the bailout as they saw fit. Here congressional outrage was more than a day late and $700 billion short.

There's plenty Congress can and should do to enhance oversight over executive branch officials. Yale Law's Bruce Ackerman argues that "we need to seriously consider requiring Senate approval of senior White House staff positions." But as long as Congress continues to write blank checks to the executive branch, it's the height of hypocrisy for them to complain about that branch's unchecked power.

Who exposed this latest bit of corruption at ACORN? -- The FBI? The local police? A congressional investigating committee? The mainstream media? No, no, no, no. It was a 20-year-old-girl named Hannah Giles and a 25-year-old law student and investigative journalist named James O'Keefe.

I first met Ms. Giles almost a year ago in her home town of Miami. Through mutual friends, she contacted me to see if I could help her get an internship with a policy group in Washington. She ultimately interned this summer at the National Journalism Center and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. Having heard about the various charges of voter and housing fraud that ACORN had been previously charged with, she decided to learn more.

ACORN claims it provides assistance to people who are trying to obtain housing and set up businesses in low-income areas. Given ACORN's sleazy record, Ms. Giles began to wonder if ACORN would also give help to those who were trying to start illegal businesses.

She contacted James O'Keefe, whom she had never met. Mr. O'Keefe, despite his youth, had already established a reputation as a highly competent and enterprising investigative journalist. Mr. O'Keefe, like President Obama, had studied Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," but his goal was to turn the tables and use the "rules" against the radical left.

Ms. Giles suggested to Mr. O'Keefe that she pretend to be a prostitute and that he play the part of her pimp to see if ACORN would help them set up a house of prostitution. Mr. O'Keefe liked the idea and agreed to work with Ms. Giles.

Using a hidden mike and camera, they first went to the ACORN office in Baltimore, and were quite stunned that the ACORN officials offered to help them -- even though they made it very clear that they wanted to set up an illegal house of prostitution and bring in underage girls from Central America to work in the house. (The video tapes of their meetings in ACORN offices can be found on www.biggovernment.com.)

Emboldened by their first success and wanting to make sure the Baltimore ACORN office was not a fluke, they then went to ACORN's office here in the District, then to Brooklyn, San Bernadino, Ca., and other cities around the country. They were given detailed legal instructions on how to avoid problems with the police and tax authorities while running an illegal operation in each location, and even made other offers of help. They funded all of their travel and other expenses out of their own pockets without any organizational support.

Lawyers, who have reviewed the tapes, believe the ACORN officials may have violated dozens of laws and regulations, and perhaps even the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes against racketeering and organized crime. After Glenn Beck and Fox News showed the Baltimore tape last Thursday, ACORN officials, clearly not knowing the extent of the O'Keefe-Giles investigation, claimed that the Baltimore officials were rogue employees and fired them.

The next day, when the D.C. tapes were released, ACORN fired two more employees, and the Census Bureau said it would no longer contract with ACORN. Mr. O'Keefe has been working with the noted journalist Andrew Breitbart to expose what he and Ms. Giles uncovered. Mr. Beck, Sean Hannity, and others at Fox News and elsewhere have taken up the story and have had Mr. O'Keefe and Ms. Giles on their shows.

ACORN officials have already made false charges against Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe, and the media organizations that have been exposing ACORN's activities. The Senate voted 83 to 7 on Monday to partially defund ACORN. As more tapes from more locations are released and ACORN's claims of not being thoroughly corrupt are shattered, it will be interesting to see the reaction of those in Congress, the administration and the media who have continued to be supportive of ACORN despite all of its past corruption.

Will they protect the taxpayers or the criminals?

Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe are true American patriots -- they did not wait around for the authorities or Congress to do something. They spotted a problem and they took action on their own at considerable personal expense and risk (though they are now being protected) to expose wrongdoing. The American Founding Fathers would be proud of Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe because they understood that more often than not, government is the problem not the solution -- and the Founders knew that the American Experiment would fail if citizens did not repetitively act to protect both their liberties and pocketbooks.

We can hope that Ms. Giles and Mr. O'Keefe will serve as role models for millions of other young Americans who see that the present generation in Washington is stealing their financial future and liberty. All too many in the mainstream media have climbed in bed with government rather than doing their duty to expose governmental wrongdoing. By using the new technologies, smart amateurs with courage and good judgment are becoming effective investigative journalists.

Judging by the massive crowd on Saturday that descended on Washington for the 9/12 March, you'd have to be deaf not to recognize that small-government conservatism remains a vital part of the national conversation.

If you've been fed a steady media diet of MSNBC over the last few months, though, you could be excused for fearing a Pennsylvania Avenue takeover by a rabble of pitchfork-wielding cranks and extras from "Deliverance." But the crowd — "in excess of 75,000 people," according to a D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services spokesman — was made up of orderly, pleasant, middle-class Americans from all across the country.

In my two hours at the protest, I didn't see a single "Birther" sign, and spied only one racially insensitive caricature. "Many of the signs," the liberal Center for American Progress alleges on its blog, "attacked President Obama using explicit racial and ethnic smears" — a claim that's simply false.

It used to irk liberals no end when conservatives crashed peace marches, snapped pictures of the nuttiest signs, and used them to condemn all Iraq war opponents as troop-hating traitors. That didn't stop CAP'ers from trying the same tactic, to little avail.

The gallery of "racist, radical portrayals" they posted after spending hours looking at tens of thousands of signs contains few that fit the bill. (If an "Obamunism" placard featuring the president in a Che beret gives you the vapors, you're probably too delicate to watch cable news without prescription tranquilizers.)

Surprisingly, for a march held the day after the 9/11 anniversary, the war on terror wasn't a prominent issue. Very few of the signs reflected the militarism and fearmongering that's been all too popular on the Right in recent years. The most common 9/12 themes were pro-Constitution, anti-czar, anti-Obamacare, and anti-bailout.

Amid the sea of hand-lettered placards were quite a few that warmed this columnist's cold libertarian heart, like "I am John Galt" and "What Would Mises Do?" "Austrian Business Cycle Theory!" blared a sign carried by a white-haired fellow, obviously pleased with his own erudition. Several 9/12'ers carried signs reading simply, "Liar" — a smart choice for the dedicated protester, as it will rarely have to be replaced from election to election.

None of this is to suggest, however, that the 9/12 March showed all was right with the Right. Movement conservatism clearly has a long-term demographic problem.

The crowd was disproportionately middle-aged, and whiter than a Jimmy Buffett concert. Some of the "outreach" efforts on the main stage were condescending and embarrassing, as when the organizers handed the microphone to right-wing rapper "Hi-Caliber." Suffice it to say that "Republican hip-hop" is every bit as excruciating as the concept suggests.

The Republican leadership's decision to position the party as Medicare's most passionate defender may be tactically smart in the short term, but it's hardly consistent with limited government, to say nothing of fiscal sanity."Deep Medicare cuts are just one of the mounting reasons why Americans are losing faith in the Democrats' government takeover of health care," House Minority Leader John Boehner declares on his web page, oblivious to the contradiction.

It would be comforting to think that the GOP is out of touch with its conservative base here, but that's unlikely. A 2007 Harris poll showed that only 2 percent of Republicans support Medicare cuts to help close the deficit.

Even so, the public seems increasingly resistant to new big-government schemes. In a recent column, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, argues that Medicare could never have passed in the current political climate: "Broad distrust of government — which was not evident in the 1960s — is an important reason why Americans are reacting so differently to health care reform in 2009 than they did in 1965."

That rising distrust of big government — of which Saturday's march was the most vivid recent example — shows this much at least: "The death of conservatism" has been greatly exaggerated.

But now the auto industry is worried about the inevitable post-subsidy drop in sales. Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of the automotive research group Edmunds.com, observes: "Nice party, but the hangover is awful."

There's also an impending downturn in the auto repair industry. There will be fewer used cars to sell and service because the clunkers program required the traded-in vehicles to be crushed. And if you rushed to buy a new car, there's a good chance you and others had to put off some other purchases.

The green eyeshade folks say the government shouldn't waste money like this in the future. But in the new ultra-Keynesian, post-budget deficit age, we need to think outside of the box. We need to expand the ambit of cash-for-clunkers.

Let's start big. The housing market remains in the doldrums. So why not a housing "cash-for-hovels" program? Trade in your old, environmentally poor house for a new, energy-efficient home and get a voucher for the value of your current property, plus $50,000. The developer would be responsible for putting the wrecking ball to your old residence; the government would keep the land for subsequent resale.

With the rise of the Kindle, online books are a reality. So we need a bucks-for-books program for dusty old books, which have occasioned the death of so many trees. Buy a Kindle and get a $20 check for every book you turn in while purchasing the new online version. Amazon.com would be responsible for creating central collection points, where books would be dumped after being torn in half to render them unusable.

The program also could be adapted for the antique and collectibles markets. A great deal of money, time, and resources are wasted as people shop in person and troll online for goods produced long ago — meaning no jobs are created today.

Turn in your antique painting, chess set, silver service, china cabinet, stein, armoire, jewelry, and more, and the government could pay you the value of your item plus provide a voucher for 10 percent of the purchase price of a modern replacement.

Uncle Sam would take title of the goods, for possible display at the Smithsonian. Constructing several new buildings to house the government's new acquisitions would generate additional jobs.

Let's not leave out airplanes. With the downturn in air travel, there is a surplus of older, less fuel-efficient aircraft. The government should provide a (large) check whenever an airline trades in an old aircraft for a new (preferably Boeing) plane. The discards could be used by the Pentagon for target practice. We'd have a stronger national defense as well as less pollution, reduced fuel consumption and more jobs.

Finally, let's eliminate the build-up of fatty, and calorie-filled snack products in cabinets and refrigerators across America in a cash-for-calories plan. Bring in your potato chips or candy and get a check for their value, plus a coupon for use towards the purchase of apples, carrots or Brussels sprouts. Surrendered foods would be used by the surgeon general in an educational campaign against obesity.

And why stop with economics? Let's apply the concept to Capitol Hill. Toss out your clunker of a congressional representative and then — and only then — get some federal pork for your district. Talk about a clunkers program that would benefit America.

In a forthcoming book, Ridge complains that the weekend before Election Day, Bush administration officials leaned on him to raise the color-coded threat level. Dismayed, Ridge refused the demand, and concluded he needed to resign. "I wondered," Ridge writes, "Is this about security or politics?"

That's a question we ought to ask about DHS as a whole. Since its creation in 2003, the department has done little to provide genuine security and much to encourage a pernicious politics of fear. We'd be better off without it.

The Homeland Security Advisory System is a case in point. Even before Ridge's revelation, two separate studies showed that Bush received a boost to his approval ratings with each escalation of the terror threat level. The warning has been raised above yellow ("elevated") 16 times, but it's never been lowered to blue or green, the bottom rungs on DHS's Ladder of Fear. Yet, with Spinal Tap logic ("this goes to 11!") the department insists on keeping all five levels.

The department itself is a dog's breakfast of 22 federal agencies brought together in the hope of providing better coordination on a common mission. But turf battles left key antiterror agencies like the FBI out of the reorganization, and DHS finished last or next to last on every measure of employee morale in a 2006 Office of Personnel Management study.

The truth, as analyst Jeffrey Rosen points out, is that DHS is 'an institutional money pit that has more to do with symbols than substance." Indeed, a congressional investigation in 2008 documented some $15 billion in failed contracts that have run wildly over budget or been cancelled before completion.

Many of the contracts that DHS considers a success have funded a growing federal assault on privacy. The fishing village of Dillingham, AK (pop. 2,400), is too small for a streetlight, but thanks to a homeland security grant, it now has 80 surveillance cameras.

The town of Ridgely, MD (pop. 1,400), got a grant for cameras as well. "It was difficult to be able to find something to use the money for," said Ridgely's police chief, but "if you don't ask, you aren't going to get a thing."

Other homeland security grants have gone toward the development of the Transportation Security Administration's "nude scanner," which should add a whole new level of indignity to the airport security line experience, in which we're already poked and prodded, and warned not to joke about the poking.

True enough, even if DHS were abolished, it wouldn't make government much smaller. Most of the department's 200,000 employees work for agencies--Customs, the Coast Guard, INS--that would survive DHS's closure. (Though we could at least stop work on the hideous, 38-acre, $4 billion Nebraska Avenue Complex currently being built in Southeast DC).

Shuttering DHS would be largely symbolic; but symbolism matters. Down to its very name--an "abhorrently un-American, odiously Teutono/Soviet term," in the words of James Fallows--the Department of Homeland Security has stood for bureaucratic centralization in an atmosphere of permanent crisis.

In this season of angry town hall meetings, liberals have taken to defending the recent overwrought DHS memo warning about "Rightwing Extremism." But for all his faults, "No Drama" Obama has resisted the temptation to boost his popularity by stoking domestic terror fears or goosing the threat level. But, as his popularity falls, that option may look increasingly attractive.

In July, DHS secretary Janet Napolitano announced the formation of a bipartisan commission to review the terror alert system, perhaps seeking political cover to scrap it in its current form. That's good news. But one wishes Congress had the political will to scrap the department as a whole.

Once upon a time, some 15 years ago, "reform" meant trying to get rid of useless, liberty-threatening cabinet departments. If the GOP ever recovers that spirit, they could do worse than starting with the DHS.

This is certainly a novel theory of the business cycle. To be taken seriously, however, any such explanation of recessions and recoveries must be tested against the facts. It is not enough to assert the U.S. economy would have experienced a "second Great Depression" were it not for the Obama stimulus plan.

Even those who think government borrowing is a free lunch can't possibly believe the government has already done enough "stimulus spending" to explain the difference between depression and recovery.

CNNMoney recently calculated that the stimulus plan has spent just $120 billion — less than 1% of GDP — mostly on temporary tax cuts ($53 billion) and additional Medicaid, food stamps and unemployment benefits. Less than $1 billion has been spent on highway and energy projects. Commitments for the future are much larger, but households and firms can't spend commitments.

Proponents of Big Government can't say we avoided the next Great Depression due to hypothetical stimulus money that is mostly unspent. So they argue it's more important that the federal government merely continued spending and didn't "slash" spending as in the early 1930s. But the federal government didn't slash spending in the early '30s. Federal spending rose by 6.2% in 1930, 7.7% in 1931 and 30.2% in 1932. Since prices were falling, real increases in federal spending were huge during the Hoover years.

President Obama clearly believes Big Government is the antidote to this and perhaps all recessions. At his first news conference in February, the president said, "The federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life." Yet that raises a key question: If the U.S. economy could not recover without a big "jolt" of deficit spending, then how did the economy recover from recessions in the distant past, when the federal government was very small?

A 1999 study in The Journal of Economic Perspectives by Christina Romer (now head of the Council of Economic Advisers) found that "real macroeconomic indicators have not become dramatically more stable between the pre-World War I and post-World War II eras, and recessions have become only slightly less severe." Ms. Romer also noted that "recessions have not become noticeably shorter" in the era of Big Government. In fact, she found the average length of recessions from 1887 to 1929 was 10.3 months. If the current recession ended in August, then the average postwar recession lasted one month longer — 11.3 months. The longest recession from 1887 to 1929 lasted 16 months. But there have been three recessions since 1973 that lasted at least that long.

The relative brevity of recessions before the New Deal is particularly surprising since the U.S. economy was then dominated by farming and manufacturing — industries far more prone to nasty cyclical surprises than today's service-based economy.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nobody thought the government could or should do anything except stand aside and let the mistakes of business and banking be fixed by those who made them. There were no Keynesian plans to borrow and spend our way out of recessions. And bankers had no Federal Reserve to bail them out until 1913. Yet recessions after the Fed was created soon turned out to be much deeper than before (1920-21, 1929-33, 1937-38) and often more persistent.

It's clear that U.S. history does not support the theory that Big Government means shorter and milder recessions. In reality, recessions always ended without government prodding, long before anyone heard of Keynes and long before the Fed existed. What's more, recessions ended more quickly before the New Deal's push for Big Government than they have in the past three decades. The economy's natural recuperative powers before the 1930s proved superior to recent tinkering by Big Government economists, politicians and central bankers.

The recent experience of other countries provides another way to test the Big Government theory of economic recovery. If it is true that Big Government prevents or cures recessions, then countries where government accounts for the largest share of GDP should have suffered much smaller losses of GDP over the past year than countries where the private sector is dominant.

The chart nearby lists 13 major economies by the size of government spending relative to GDP using OECD figures for 2007 (the U.S. is well above 40% by 2009). Europe's big spenders are at the top, the U.S. and Japan are in the middle, and fiscally frugal countries like China and India are at the bottom.

The last column shows the change in real GDP over the most recent four quarters — ending in the second quarter for the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Sweden and China, but the first for the rest. Four of the five deepest contractions happened in countries with the biggest governments — Sweden, Italy, Germany and the U.K. Japan's government spending in 2007 was about like ours, but Japan's tax rates are far more punitive and the economy has suffered endless "fiscal stimulus" packages. China's central government spent 22% of GDP, but 30%-plus with local government included.

To believe Big Government explains why this extremely long recession was not even longer, we need to find some connection between the size of government and the depth and duration of recessions. There is no such connection in U.S. history, or in recent cyclical experience of other countries.

On the contrary, recessions have become longer as the U.S. government (and the Fed) became larger, more expensive, and more involved in the economy. Foreign countries in which government spending accounts for about half of the economy have also suffered the deepest recessions lately, while economic recovery is well established in countries where government spending is a smaller share of GDP than in the U.S.

In short, bigger government appears to produce only bigger and longer recessions.

The members of that ultimate federal board will themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question. For another example of the growing, tumultuous resistance to "Dr. Obama," particularly among seniors, there is a July 29 Washington Times editorial citing a line from a report written by a key adviser to Obama on cost-efficient health care, prominent bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel).

Emanuel writes about rationing health care for older Americans that "allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination." (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing — which is fundamental to Obamacare goals — "the complete lives system." You see, at 65 or older, you've had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks.

No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama's eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a "very difficult democratic conversation" about how "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care" costs.

This end-of-life consultation has been stripped from the Senate Finance Committee bill because of democracy-in-action town-hall outcries but remains in three House bills.

A specific end-of-life proposal is in draft Section 1233 of H.R. 3200, a House Democratic health care bill that is echoed in two others that also call for versions of "advance care planning consultation" every five years — or sooner if the patient is diagnosed with a progressive or terminal illness.

As the Washington Post's Charles Lane penetratingly explains (Undue influence," Aug. 8): the government would pay doctors to discuss with Medicare patients explanations of "living wills and durable powers of attorney … and (provide) a list of national and state-specific resources to assist consumers and their families" on making advance-care planning (read end-of-life) decisions.

Significantly, Lane adds that, "The doctor 'shall' (that's an order) explain that Medicare pays for hospice care (hint, hint)."

But the Obama administration claims these fateful consultations are "purely voluntary." In response, Lane — who learned a lot about reading between the lines while the Washington Post's Supreme Court reporter — advises us:

"To me, 'purely voluntary' means 'not unless the patient requests one.'"

But Obamas' doctors will initiate these chats. "Patients," notes Lane, "may refuse without penalty, but many will bow to white-coated authority."

And who will these doctors be? What criteria will such Obama advisers as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel set for conductors of end-of-life services?

I was alerted to Lanes' crucial cautionary advice — for those of use who may be influenced to attend the Obamacare twilight consultations — by Wesley J. Smith, a continually invaluable reporter and analyst of, as he calls his most recent book, the "Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America" (Encounter Books).

As more Americans became increasingly troubled by this and other fearful elements of Dr. Obama's cost-efficient health care regimen, Smith adds this vital advice, no matter what legislation Obama finally signs into law:

"Remember that legislation itself is only half the problem with Obamacare. Whatever bill passes, hundreds of bureaucrats in the federal agencies will have years to promulgate scores of regulations to govern the details of the law.

"This is where the real mischief could be done because most regulatory actions are effectuated beneath the public radar. It is thus essential, as just one example, that any end-of-life counseling provision in the final bill be specified to be purely voluntary … and that the counseling be required by law to be neutral as to outcome. Otherwise, even if the legislation doesn't push in a specific direction — for instance, THE GOVERNMENT REFUSING TREATMENT — the regulations could." (Emphasis added.)

Who'll let us know what's really being decided about our lives — and what is set into law? To begin with, Charles Lane, Wesley Smith and others whom I'll cite and add to as this chilling climax of the Obama presidency comes closer.

Condemning the furor at town-hall meetings around the country as "un-American," Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are blind to truly participatory democracy — as many individual Americans believe they are fighting, quite literally, for their lives.

I wonder whether Obama would be so willing to promote such health care initiatives if, say, it were 60 years from now, when his children will — as some of the current bills seem to imply — have lived their fill of life years, and the health care resources will then be going to the younger Americans?

The poverty of those years caused many to emigrate from the country, mostly to the U.S. Upper Midwest. Beginning in the 1870s, Sweden created the conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector. As a result, Sweden for many years had the world's fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third-highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s. Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.

Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States. However, by the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.

Most full-time employees faced marginal tax rates of 65 percent to 75 percent, as contrasted with 40 percent in 1960. Labor-market regulations were introduced to make it very difficult to fire workers. Business profits were taxed heavily, and financial markets were regulated heavily. By 1993, the government budget deficit was 13 percent of GDP and total government debt was about 71 percent of GDP, which led to a rapid fall in the value of the currency and a rise in inflation.

These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest. Economic growth slowed to a crawl. Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust. Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Sweden began an economic course correction that continues today. Marginal tax rates were reduced for most of the population, and this trend is expected to continue.

The wealth tax and inheritance tax were abolished. Financial markets, telecommunications, electricity, road transport, taxis and other activities were deregulated. Privatization of industry was begun, and the current government is continuing the process. The generosity of some welfare and other benefits has been reduced, with the goal of making work more economically rewarding relative to government benefits. Also, trade liberalization has been expanded greatly. The result has been a pickup in economic growth, and Sweden is no longer falling further behind other developed countries.

One notable success has been pension reform. Sweden was the first nation to implement a mandatory government retirement system for all its citizens. Sweden, like the United States and most other countries, was faced with an increasing, unfunded social security liability as a result of low birthrates and people living much longer. After studying the problem in the early 1990s, the Swedes approved, in 1998, moving toward a Chilean private pension system, first developed by former Chilean Labor Minister Jose Pinera. (Seventeen countries have adopted variations of the Pinerian system, which has been very successful in Chile.)

The new Swedish pension system has four key features, including partial privatization, individual accounts, a safety net to protect the poor and a transition to protect retirees and older workers. The benefits have been substantial budgetary savings, higher retirement income and faster economic growth.

Those who wish to chase the Swedish model need first to decide which model they seek: The high-growth, pre-1960 model; the low-growth model of the 1970s and 1980s; or the reformist, welfare-state model of recent years. The irony is that the current Democratic Congress and administration are rapidly emulating the parts of the Swedish model that proved disastrous and rejecting those parts that are proving to be successful.

Most Swedes now understand that they still have a good distance to go to further strengthen the market economy to ensure continued growth. Thus, they continue to move toward reducing the size of government rather than increasing it.

If the Obama Democrats were wise enough to learn from the Swedes, they would be moving toward trade liberalization rather than away from it. They would be moving to at least partially privatize Social Security. They would not seek to prevent the abolition of the death tax. They would be reducing rather than increasing regulations. They would be reducing rather than trying to increase marginal tax rates on work, saving and investment. They would be reducing the corporate income tax as was done in Sweden.

Finally, the Obama Democrats would be reducing government spending rather than increasing it and not running deficits as large as those that almost sank the Swedish economy 16 years ago.

The Kennedy-esque cult of personality that surrounded the new president led many conservatives and libertarians to fear he'd be able to work his will in Congress, dramatically increasing the size of government.

Yet, cap and trade has dropped off this year's legislative agenda and today Obama's signature initiative — national health care — remains stalled, growing more unpopular by the minute.

A new Rasmussen poll has 54 percent of American voters preferring no health care reform to passage of what's currently on the table. In the meantime, Obama has lost more than 25 points off his initial, stratospheric approval ratings (maybe it should have told us something that the last president to reach Obama's levels of early popularity was Jimmy Carter).

Obama bears much of the blame for his current political woes, having pushed an overly ambitious agenda that the public seems reluctant to accept. But he's also the victim of trends that long predated his presidency.

Back in November, political scientist Paul C. Light noted that the president's legislative agenda had been shrinking for more than 40 years because "there is simply less room in government" for the sort of large-scale initiatives Obama has in mind.

"There will not be a New Deal or Great Society this coming year," Light wrote — political conditions would not allow it. Among other things, the increasing prevalence of the filibuster has enhanced the Senate's historic role as a brake on federal ambition, much to the chagrin of liberals.

But perhaps the biggest factor frustrating Obama's legislative agenda is declining trust in government, a phenomenon that's been on visceral display in recent town-hall meetings.

President Lyndon Johnson pushed the Great Society through Congress at a time when three-quarters of Americans told pollsters that they trusted the federal government to do what is right "most of the time" or "just about always." Today, that number's around 30 percent.

But for a brief post-9/11 blip, trust in government never again reached its Great Society-era heights after Vietnam and Watergate. Since the war in Iraq and the prescription drug entitlement passed during that brief period of high trust, we ought to be glad that it didn't last longer than it did.

Vanderbilt University's Marc Hetherington, the leading scholar on political trust, echoes Light, writing that declining faith in the feds makes "another Great Society or New Frontier ... unlikely in a post-Cold War world."

In fact, Hetherington sees low levels of political trust as a key factor behind the failure of the last attempt to pass national health care, in President Bill Clinton's first term. "Opponents of health care reform caused people to think about the Clinton plan in terms of how much they trusted the government," Hetherington writes, and this "was sufficient to seal the fate of health care reform."

It also may do the trick this time around. Obama's effort to assert control with one-seventh of the U.S. economy comes after nearly a year of emergency governance on the economic front.

From TARP to the auto bailout to a stimulus package that cost more than the entire war in Iraq, since last fall this administration and the last have seemed bent on fundamentally changing the federal government's role in the economy. Americans are looking at Obamacare with that as a backdrop, and they don't like what they see.

It's too early to declare the death of national health care, of course, but the smart money says that Obama's efforts will go the way of Clintoncare. Even if the era of Big Government initiatives is over, however, that doesn't mean the era of Big Government is.

The ambitious plans of past presidents — in the form of Social Security and Medicare — will continue to increase the federal government's share of the economy even if new entitlement programs don't get passed.

But the resurgence of public skepticism toward federal power is good news for those of us who support limited, constitutional government. And it's about time we had some good news.

Alas, the federal government borrowed a little money during the past year. And big government financed by debt differs little from big government financed by taxes. Aug. 12 was Cost of Government Day, when we finally stopped paying for government — spending and regulation.

Monika Ciesielska has produced the latest Cost of Government Day report for the Center for Fiscal Accountability, a special project of Americans for Tax Reform. She found that the Cost-of Government Day advanced nearly a month over last year.

The reason: wild government spending and expansive federal regulation. Explains Ciesielska: "The driving factor for this development is that all components of the cost of government — federal spending, state and local spending, and regulations — are now increasing faster than national income, which shrunk as a result of the financial crisis in 2008." From bailouts to alleged stimulus, government has been tossing money at just about anything that moves, and quite a few things that don't. Government outlays now account for 28.5 percent of gross domestic product or total economic output, a peacetime record.

The largest share of the cost of government is attributable to Washington. Writes Ciesielska, "The average American worker will have to labor 111 days just to pay for federal spending, which is now consuming 30.36 percent of national income."

Next are state and local governments. Because most state governments are legally required to balance their budgets, there is a limit to the financial shenanigans that even the most irresponsible politicians, like those in California, can employ. As a result, Americans are working "only" a couple days more this year compared with last year for states and localities, 49 days. Still, that number is far too high.

Regulation comes to 65 days, up four days over 2008, "reflecting rapid growth in regulatory costs," Ciesielska writes. No doubt, some rules do some good. But even the "good" rules often are overbroad or inefficient. And far too much regulation is merely disguised looting, or what economists call "rent-seeking."

Unfortunately, Aug. 12 is merely the national average. People living in particularly big spending, intrusive regulating states have weeks more of government-created pain to endure.

The worst state, as always, is Connecticut: The day won't arrive until Sept. 7. Citizens of New Jersey have to wait until Sept. 6 to finish their servile obligations. The burden on residents of the Golden State is mild in comparison, with a COGD of Aug. 23.

Although federal outlays are likely to dip from today's post-bailout peak, they are unlikely to contract much. Certainly the 2010 Obama budget, despite being called "A New Era of Responsibility," offers little hope. Explains Ciesielska: "According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it would have increased total spending by $2.7 trillion over 10 years over the current baseline, including interest. This would amount to an increase of $9,000 for every American."

Indeed, the presidential budget is merely a starting point. Historically outlays always end up well above projections. Moreover, a number of financial storm clouds — such as Medicare and Social Security — continue to billow around us, likely to lead to new proposals for additional bailouts, stimuli and other forms of spending.

Unless we change course, Cost of Government Day will continue skyward. "The era of big government is over," intoned Bill Clinton more than 13 years ago. In truth, the era of big government was only beginning.

The future looks equally bleak. The time for change — real change — is now.

When Gallup recently asked voters to describe themselves politically, 40 percent of Americans describe their views as conservative, 35 percent as moderate, and 21 percent as liberal — a recent shift in the conservative direction.

See the Gallup report here.

But in a 2006 Zogby Poll, 59 percent of voters said they would describe themselves as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal." They don't fit comfortably into either party's base. Many of these are the independents who should rightly be the hot cheerleaders of the electorate, extravagantly courted by both parties. [Disclosure: Cato paid for this question, but the poll itself was Zogby's regular Thursday-after-the-election poll of people who said they voted.]

Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center found that the much-discussed, much-pandered-to "bases" of the two parties accounted for only about a quarter of the electorate: 11 percent of Americans describe themselves as liberal Democrats, 15 percent conservative Republicans. Independents grew from 30 to 39 percent of the electorate in just five months after the 2008 election.

See the Pew report here.

Libertarian — or fiscally conservative, socially liberal — voters are often torn between their aversions to the Republicans' social conservatism (and, for some of them, military adventurism) and the Democrats' fiscal irresponsibility. Usually they end up voting on the basis of economics.

Research that David Kirby and I have done shows that libertarian-leaning voters have typically given up to 70 percent of their votes to Republicans. But in 2004 and 2006, that number fell off sharply. Republican congressional candidates barely held a majority of libertarian votes in 2006, and of course the Republicans took a pounding in that election.

Why did those voters turn away from the Republicans? Well, Bush and the Republican Congress stuck to their social-conservative guns: they sought to ban gay marriage, limit stem cell research, and insert the federal government into Terry Schiavo's hospital room.

They got bogged down in an unnecessary and endless war, and they asserted extraordinary powers of surveillance and arrest. Meanwhile, they managed to add more than a trillion dollars to the federal budget and launched the biggest new entitlement since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. So those who had been willing to accept some social conservatism as the price of fiscal responsibility realized they'd made a bad bargain.

Some of those independents voted Democratic in 2006 and 2008, figuring that the Democrats would be more tolerant and could hardly be more profligate. And what are they now seeing?

President Obama is exceeding all their fears on fiscal and economic issues. After promising a "net spending cut" during the campaign and denouncing "the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history," he has sent federal spending and the deficit soaring into the stratosphere.

Meanwhile, he's not delivering what some of his voters hoped for on social issues. No gay marriage, even as Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, conservative superlawyer Ted Olson, and the legislature of crusty New Hampshire sign on.

No end to the drug war, even though he's the third president in a row to have acknowledged using drugs. He even mocked a question about drug legalization at his online town hall. ("Dude, we elected that guy, what's up with that?" is Reason editor Matt Welch's summary of the blogosphere's reaction.) No pullout from Iraq.

So once again fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters are starting to wonder if they made a bad bargain.

Independents who turned against the Republicans are likely to become equally disillusioned with Obama, and there's already some evidence of that in the polls. Support for "smaller government with fewer services" has risen in the ABC News/Washington Post poll, and independents prefer it by 61 to 35 percent, a margin three times as large as a year ago. The number of people who see Obama as an "old-style tax and spend Democrat" has risen by 11 percentage points.

In a USA Today poll, a majority oppose Obama's health care efforts and 59 percent say he's spending too much. In another ABC/Washington Post poll, only 25 percent "strongly approve" of his health care plans, and 33 percent strongly disapprove. His honeymoon may turn out to be as passionate, yet brief, as Britney Spears' Las Vegas marriage.

It's hard out here for a fiscally conservative, socially liberal voter. But at least there's always the other party to try again.