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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

Among the many Republican complaints about Democratic health reform plans, one – chiefly heard of late from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – is that it would "cut Medicare."

That McConnell can go home and sleep at night after uttering that charge is a grand testament to the jaded, disconnected, and often surreal nature of Washington politics.

What McConnell is doing is engaging in the time-honored tradition of "Mediscare": pandering to seniors – a crucial political constituency because they are well-organized and turn out to vote in high numbers – by suggesting that one of their pet entitlement programs is imperiled.

This effective tactic has most often been the bailiwick of Democrats, back when Republicans were the party of fiscal discipline and made pronouncements about getting federal deficits and entitlement spending under control (boy does that seem like a long time ago now). That McConnell and the GOP have now embraced it with gusto demonstrates how screwed we are as a country, because neither main political party is at all serious about facing fiscal reality.

Now, let's be clear. The Democrats do cut Medicare, by more than $500 billion under the bills now being considered. And, while the Democrats claim that all they are doing is eliminating "fraud, waste, and abuse," the reality is that under the Democratic bills, seniors will get less.

For example, roughly 10.2 million seniors currently receive their health care through the Medicare Advantage program. That program offers many seniors benefits not included in traditional Medicare, including preventive-care services, coordinated care for chronic conditions, routine physical examinations, additional hospitalization, skilled-nursing facility stays, routine eye and hearing examinations and glasses and hearing aids.

The bills currently making their way through Congress would cut payments to Medicare Advantage plans by $100 billion to $150 billion. In response, many insurers are expected to stop participating in the program, while others will probably increase premiums. Millions of seniors will likely be forced off their current plans and back into traditional Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office makes it clear that, at the very least, the cuts "would reduce the extra benefits that would be made available to beneficiaries through Medicare Advantage plans."

The Democratic cuts also hit traditional Medicare. For example, the bills would reduce reimbursements for diagnostic imaging – things like CT scans, MRIs and X-rays – by as much as 25 percent. And the Senate Finance Committee's bill would penalize doctors who perform too many procedures or tests. Providers whose utilization is in the 90th percentile or above, compared with national averages, will have their Medicare reimbursements cut.

The whole point of such provisions is to reduce services. But none of this justifies the Republican's hypocrisy on this issue.

For example, Republicans just finished voting unanimously against an attempt to block a Democratic proposal to stop a 21 percent reduction in Medicare provider payments scheduled to go in effect next year, the so-called "doc fix." And, earlier this year, Republicans released an alternative budget that contained even bigger reductions in Medicare spending than the Democrats now propose.

That was the fiscally responsible position to take. The "doc fix" was not paid for and would have added an additional $250 billion to the federal deficit. That's why 13 fiscally responsible Democrats joined Republicans in voting against this bill.

And, Medicare is already facing unfunded liabilities of $50 trillion to $100 trillion. As a percentage of GDP, Medicare costs are expected to rise from 2.7 percent today to 9.4 percent by 2050. Unless we are prepared to completely mortgage our children's future, Republicans were right to propose cuts in their budget proposal.

But now, sensing political advantage, Republicans are in danger of reverting to the fiscally irresponsible "big-government" conservatism that all but destroyed the Republican brand during the Bush years.

There are many good reasons for opposing the Democrat's health reform. It is government takeover of the health care system that would dramatically increase both taxes and insurance costs, while all forcing millions of Americans into a government-run system. There is no need for Mediscare – especially for a party that so desperately needs to return to its fiscally responsible, limited-government roots.

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.

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.

The conservative case for government intervention in energy markets is just as flimsy as the liberal case for government intervention in any other sector of the economy. Energy markets may not work as perfectly as in a textbook model, but they work — and government works even less perfectly.

Consider one of the premises underlying the present energy-policy debates: the fear that our reliance on foreign oil leaves us vulnerable to supply disruptions. Most conservatives seem to believe that a reduction in imports will insulate us from price shocks caused by developments overseas. That is nonsense. A supply disruption anywhere will increase the price of crude oil everywhere for the same reason that an early frost in Florida will increase the price of citrus produced in Florida and California by roughly the same amount. Energy independence provides no protection against supply disruptions abroad.

Others fear that reliance on imports requires us to undertake military commitments to ensure that oil continues to flow. But producers have even more reason to worry about the safety of their facilities than we do and, likewise, more reason to ensure the security of international oil-shipping lanes. Hence, they have every incentive to defend their oil infrastructure, whether we help foot the bill or not.

No less a conservative than Dick Cheney argues that producers and consumers make bad decisions in energy markets: They fail to appreciate the profit opportunities associated with certain investments, he says, be they renewable, nuclear, clean coal, ethanol — whatever. Consumers, the argument goes, are too risk-averse to make expensive bets on promising technology, while they discount the certainty of energy depletion and the dwindling of power supplies. And, Cheney says, producers' time horizons are too short to invest in energy technologies that offer long-term promise. But economists investigating the issue find little evidence for assertions like Cheney's, and little reason to believe that markets in energy are different from markets in other commodities.

Policy activists are on somewhat firmer ground, however, when they argue that energy prices do not fully reflect the environmental costs associated with energy consumption. But economists are wildly divergent in their estimates of the costs of these energy-consumption externalities. Some studies find that present prices for conventional fuels, such as natural gas, are too high rather than too low — owing to regulatory distortions in the market.

In the case of fuels for which the evidence about environmental externalities is clear, the solution is a tax that increases the price and allows producers and consumers complete freedom to adjust. But that would create visible costs and diffuse benefits, and politicians prefer the opposite: concentrated benefits for companies that collect subsidies and diffuse costs imposed on the taxpayers and the economy.

The strongest critique of a laissez-faire energy regime is that innovators in energy markets cannot capture the full benefits of their innovations. Hence, businessmen may underinvest in energy research and development. Notice that the complaint, however, is that industry will underinvest in R&D across the board — not that investors back the wrong technologies. If this is a serious problem, the solution is to make all R&D more attractive through preferences in the tax code. Targeted energy R&D subsidies and mandates simply substitute political judgments about investments for market judgments, even though politicians have no comparative advantage in sorting technological winners from losers.

Consider the current love affair of the Right with "clean coal" technology. Billions of federal tax dollars have been spent since the 1980s on various iterations of this concept — most recently via George W. Bush's "FutureGen" project and the "Clean Coal Power Initiative" — yet the marketplace has not been friendly to new coal plants. From 2001 through 2007, 179,382 megawatts of natural-gas-fired electric generators were added, but only 3,311 megawatts of coal-fired generation capacity came online.

It's not that we don't know how to make coal facilities cleaner — it's that we don't know how to make coal plants both cleaner and profitable. Throwing more tax money at this riddle will not necessarily produce an answer. Why are conservatives doubling down on the same ill-fated taxpayer adventure that Ronald Reagan labored so mightily to kill in the 1980s?

Nuclear power is another favored recipient of conservative largesse. Despite promises in the 1950s that nuclear power would soon become "too cheap to meter," 50 years of lavish federal subsidies and regulatory preferences have yet to produce an industry that can turn a profit without taxpayer help. That is an observation that even the nuclear-energy industry's trade association freely concedes, at least when it is time for politicians to reconsider the merits of existing subsidies such as the federal guarantee of private loans to the industry, federal protection against liabilities beyond a certain threshold, production tax credits, and the like. Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf calculates that nuclear-power costs would increase by almost 50 percent if those subsidies were eliminated.

How is the conservative case for the above subsidies any different from the liberal case for subsidizing solar or wind energy, or high-mileage automobiles — or, for that matter, the case for government backing of financial institutions and automobile companies? It isn't, and conservatives should not check their skepticism about central planning and the bureaucratic ordering of markets at the door when they walk into the energy-policy funhouse. There is no BTU exception to The Wealth of Nations.

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.

Karl Rove dreamed that he and Bush, like strategist Mark Hanna and President William McKinley in 1896, would create a generation of Republican dominance. Instead, he delivered both Congress and the presidency to the Democrats.

Bush turned off libertarian-leaning moderates and independents with his profligate spending, his excessive social conservatism, and the foundering war in Iraq.

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. And voters simply don't believe his claim that he can extend health insurance to 47 million more people and extend mandated coverage without added costs.

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 percent 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.

Voters are turning against a year's worth of takeovers, bailouts, and new spending programs. Ironically, the first four months of those programs were actually Bush's doing. But Obama "owns" the whole shebang now.

In a July USA Today poll, a majority oppose Obama's health care efforts and 59 percent say he's spending too much. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll the same month, only 25 percent "strongly approve" of his health care plans, and 33 percent strongly disapprove.

Obama remains personally popular, even as support for his programs drops. But his honeymoon may turn out to be as passionate, yet brief, as a Hollywood marriage.

Despite the growing disillusionment with Democratic spending plans, polls still show that voters prefer that Democrats control Congress after next year's elections. However, the latest poll shows a three-point Democratic lead, down from seven points in July and nine points in April. And that margin is far smaller than the massive 19-point lead Democrats held over Republicans in June 2008. So in less than a year and a half, the Democratic margin has fallen from 19 points to three, the party's smallest lead since 2004.

Republicans still face the challenge of uniting their party around economic issues of lower taxes and less spending, rather than driving away moderates, professionals, and rugged-individualist Westerners with their socially conservative crusades.

In usually Republican Virginia, gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell saw his lead cut in half when The Washington Post uncovered a document in which he had proposed that Republicans seek to "punish" homosexuality and declare working women "detrimental to the family."

One big problem for Republicans in 2006 and 2008 was that their own voters were embarrassed and disillusioned, while Democratic activists were energized. In 2010, as in 1994, it looks like conservatives and Republicans will be the energized, determined part of the electorate. The GOP is raising more money than the Democrats this year, a rare accomplishment for the minority party. One advantage for Democrats is that in 1994, no one saw the Republican surge coming. This time, people do.

Charlie Cook, the dean of political prognosticators, may have been a bit too strong when he said that the growing fears of moderate and independent voters that "Washington was taking irreversible actions that would drive mountainous deficits higher,... that government was taking on far more than it could competently handle and far more than the country could afford, [and] expanding too far, too fast" should "terrify" Democrats. But they are no doubt worried.

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.

I'm not so sure. But at least the conservatism of Sen. Robert Taft, Sen. Barry Goldwater, and Reagan stood for a limited constitutional government in opposition to the federal aggrandizement of the New Deal and the Great Society. Back in the FDR-JFK-LBJ years, conservatives even stood for congressional government and against the imperial presidency.

But what does conservatism stand for today, other than opposition to President Obama? President Bush expanded entitlements, increased federal spending by more than a trillion dollars, federalized education, launched "nation-building" projects in two far-flung regions, and accumulated more power in the White House than any previous president.

Yet the masses assembled at the Conservative Political Action Conference chanted "Four More Years!" at him in the eighth year of his reign. Is that really a record that conservatives wanted more of?

Steven F. Hayward suggests in today's edition of The Washinton Post that one reason for conservatism's having gotten off track, one that I've heard from other, mostly older, conservatives: A movement once led by William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman now gets its intellectual direction from talk show hosts and bloggers. Where are the tomes of yesteryear?

Well, it's a fast-paced, market-driven world. If celebrities and rabble-rousing are what sell, then we'd better hope for some smart ideas on the airwaves. And it's not like conservatives are alone in this trend.

Buckley jousted with John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter face off with Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore. Six years ago the Boston Globe noted that liberal books were, at least briefly, dominating the New York Times bestseller list.

Along with Hillary Clinton's autobiography, those books were "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)," "Big Lies," "Thieves in High Places," and "Stupid White Men." Not exactly a sign of the intellectual depth of American liberalism.

The good news about the Obama era is that the president has returned the issue of the size, scope, and power of the federal government to center stage. And that in turn has revived the long-dormant small-government spirit in American conservatism.

In that regard, I'm more positive than Hayward is about the "tea party" movement. True, it is somewhat "unfocused," without a clear "connection to a concrete ideology." But it reflects and galvanizes the natural American antipathy to big government.

Now the responsibility of the conservative media and political leaders is to give the tea partiers a positive cause to rally around, by shining light on scholars with good ideas. There are plenty of free-market intellectuals today, far more than in the era when Milton Friedman dined alone. Glenn Beck does indeed sometimes devote significant time to a single intellectual; other talk show hosts should do the same.

Conservatives often prefer the prudent and cautious spirit of Edmund Burke and F. A. Hayek to the more libertarian and "progressive" vision of Thomas Jefferson. But neither Burke nor Hayek believed simply in standing athwart history, crying "Stop!"

Burke, after all, was a Whig, not a Tory, and a supporter of the American Revolution. And Hayek insisted that he was not a conservative:

"Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place."

He called himself a liberal, and he thought that Margaret Thatcher, with her vigorous program of free-market reform, was also a liberal. By whatever name, modern American conservatives would do well to take to heart Hayek's rallying cry:

"We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is … a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty …which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible."

The trick for 21st-century American conservatives, conservatives in a country founded in libertarian revolution, is to decide which traditions are worth holding on to. I would suggest as a good first rule that we allow the natural evolution of society and market, while limiting coercive intervention into those processes.

Conservatism should make its peace with natural social change, before it loses the entire younger generation, while reaffirming its commitment to freedom and limited government.

The Obama team appears to believe it has the authority to implement comprehensive climate change regulation, Congress be damned. Worse still, under current constitutional law--which has little to do with the actual Constitution--they're probably right.

In a democratic country, you'd think that before the executive branch could regulate CO2--a ubiquitous substance essential to life--the legislature would have to vote on the issue. But you'd be wrong.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1970 Clean Air Act's definition of air pollutant was broad enough to allow regulation of CO2 emissions from new cars, and that the EPA was required to regulate once it issued a finding that CO2 contributes to global warming. In fact, once the EPA rules that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant--as it did in April--regulation of industrial sources likely becomes mandatory as well.

But existing law still leaves the executive branch enormous discretionary power--and thus a hammer to hold over Congress's head. A report issued in April by the New York University Law School argues that "if Congress fails to act, President Obama has the power under the Clean Air Act to adopt a cap-and-trade system."

James Madison believed that there could be "no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person." And yet, here we are, with those powers united in the person of a president who has pledged to heal the planet and stop the oceans' rise.

This constitutional nightmare is the culmination of a trend many years in the making. The first sentence of the Constitution's first article says that "all legislative Powers herein granted" are vested in Congress.

The Supreme Court once took that language seriously, as when, in 1935, it struck down a key New Deal program for delegating legislative power to the executive. Yet the Court eventually made its peace with statutes that allow the executive branch to both make and enforce the law.

That paved the way for the modern administrative state, which looks a lot like the situation complained of in the Declaration of Independence, in which "a multitude of New Offices... harass our people and eat out their substance."

After 9/11, the phrase "unitary executive theory" (UET) came to stand for the idea that the president can do whatever he pleases in the national security arena. But it originally stood for a humbler proposition: UET's architects in the Reagan administration argued that the Constitution's grant of executive power to the president meant that he controlled the executive branch, and could therefore rein in aggressive regulatory agencies.

In an era when Republicans held a virtual lock on the Electoral College, that idea had some appeal. But as Elena Kagan, now President Obama's Solicitor General, pointed out in a 2001 Harvard Law Review article, there's little reason to think that "presidential supervision of administration inherently cuts in a deregulatory direction."

How far will Obama push in the other direction? He may be reluctant to stretch his authority as far as the law will allow, in a political climate where even green-leaning Democrats scream bloody murder every time gas prices rise.

But as Kagan notes, after the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, President Clinton used his regulatory authority unilaterally to show progress, pushing "a distinctly activist and pro-regulatory agenda." As Obama's popularity erodes, he may come to like the idea of being the "decider."

Will liberals who decried George W. Bush's unilateralism object to this staggering concentration of executive power? Don't hold your breath.

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.

What's worse, according to Carlson, is the "hard-edged propaganda that now suffuses history textbooks. A thorough cover-to-cover reading of almost any high school history text leaves you with the impression that the United States is at best embarrassing, and at worst a menace to world peace."

If you ask me, the United States' unjustified invasion and occupation of Iraq makes it a menace to world peace almost by definition. And the history of the United States is at least embarrassing. That European colonists and the U.S. government savagely murdered indigenous Americans, stole their land, and pushed them onto reservations is not a fiction ginned up to confuse American kids. Nor was this country's brutal history of slavery and racial apartheid some kind of lie designed to shame junior Americans. These horrors of history are real and they really are shameful.

Carlson's rhetoric suggests that an unsullied pride in one's country is a birthright not to be denied by downer liberal textbooks. He conveys the impression that avoiding injury to patriotic feeling should take precedence over tough truths—a typical form of conservative political correctness. Yet nationalism untempered by the bloody truth leaves citizens all too willing to cede to the state the unchecked discretion to torture and kill—a problem that is by no means theoretical these days.

My point is not to prove Carlson wrong. Nor do I aim to defend the textbooks Carlson maligns. (I would probably hate them for other reasons.) The point is that Tucker Carlson and I disagree very, very sharply about the kinds of things we think kids should find in a textbook on American history, and that's significant. You might think Carlson and I hail from different ideological planets. But as a matter of fact, we are both fellows of the libertarian Cato Institute. If our division over an ideal curriculum runs this deep, just imagine how vast the rift must be between the conservatives to Carlson's right and the liberals to my left. There is no way we're all going to agree.

Yet in 30 states, local school boards choose textbooks for their entire school districts. In the remaining 20, state-level boards choose textbooks for an entire state. Because statewide markets in California and Texas are so huge, the best bet for the big textbook publishing companies is to tailor their products to the tastes of textbook adoption committees in one or both states, leaving small-state committees with little influence.

We are a spectacularly diverse society, yet we have somehow settled on a system in which enormous captive populations of students are made to learn the same exact thing from the same boring book. When policy requires that every impressionable young mind in a town, city, or state be exposed to one set of assumptions about ethnicity and gender, one approach to religion, one version of American history, one account of Christopher Columbus, one interpretation of the Civil War or the New Deal, you can bet there will be wrenching conflict. And you can bet that the one-size-fits-all textbooks that emerge from this politicized selection process will fit no one. Mind-numbing blandness is the key to their success.

Despite a textbook market devoted to controversy avoidance, some parents (and pundits) nevertheless see a vast conspiracy to indoctrinate. This results not from incendiary books but from the incompatible ideologies of the adults who scrutinize them. Here's something I bet Carlson and I could agree on. The ideological differences that fuel the textbook wars wouldn't be such a big deal if we had an education system in which parents, armed with school vouchers or education tax credits, had the power to choose their kids' curricula by choosing their school. With greater school choice, the K–12 textbook market would come to more closely resemble the college textbook market—a lively, competitive scrum where individual instructors select from a wide array of texts embodying different perspectives and pedagogical assumptions.

Through trial and error and the test of time, certain texts are recognized for excellence and gain market share, but instructors are never at a loss for alternatives. One might worry that greater school choice could lead to a cacophonous Babel of incompatible, ideological educations. Yet, despite dizzying curricular variety, college-level school choice has not kept graduates of Brigham Young and Brown from working amicably side by side in the same companies.

Perhaps the planet will burn to a cinder if third-graders aren't uniformly convinced they are killing Gaia, the Earth organism, one carbon-emitting breath at a time. Perhaps America will lose the will to defend itself if its teens challenge the notion that American soil is uniquely sweet. If so, there may be reason to deny parents the power to choose the books their children learn from by choosing the schools in which they learn. If not, we're making a terrible mistake.

Either way, we've settled on an educational system so fraught with ideological tension that an anodyne "Do your best!" speech from the government's chief executive sparks fears that public schools have become taxpayer-funded indoctrination camps. At the conclusion of his Fox News special, Tucker Carlson exhorts parents who find "bias and distortion" in their kids' textbooks to "raise holy hell." And there you have it. There's the pathetic principle that governs the content of American public education today: May the most aggrieved hell-raisers win.

That the president would even contemplate such a speech gives you a pretty good idea.

Depending on whom you ask, you get very different answers about the immediate cause of our national schoolyard brawl.

Many Obama supporters have been thrusting their fingers squarely at right-wingers, who, they say, hate the President and will stop at nothing to bring him down.

"We have just gone through one of the most shameful episodes of the young Obama presidency," wrote columnist E.J. Dionne. "Shameful because of the behavior of the right wing, shameful because the media played into an extremist agenda, shameful because we proved that our political system has become so dysfunctional that a president gets punished for doing the right thing."

Critics of the address point to a different culprit: U.S. Department of Education lesson plans that came out well before the speech. Among many things, they suggested that students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president," and made clear that students would be inspired by the president, no matter what. They also indicated that the speech might delve into contentious social issues, pushing "students…to discuss main ideas from the speech, i.e. citizenship, personal responsibility, civic duty." Only one of those things fit a simple, "work-hard" message.

What created the igniting spark, though, isn't nearly as important as knowing how we got to such flammable circumstances in the first place.

The answer is actually pretty simple: For decades more and more power has been concentrated in Washington, so reasonable people with legitimate disagreements have had to fight much more – and much harder – over what goes on in DC. The trend has only accelerated over the last couple of years, with bank bailouts, the stimulus, takeovers of Chrysler and GM, and potentially much greater federal involvement in health care.

Education has mirrored the trend. After more than a century-and-a-half of Washington keeping out of classrooms because the Constitution gives it no authority to go in, over the last roughly sixty years federal intrusions have built slowly, peaking with the now school-dominating No Child Left Behind Act. That means that until relatively recently no president would have even imagined giving a national, back-to-school address, and no one would have had to fight one.

But it's not just centralization that makes federal politics an increasingly explosive tinderbox. After all, concentrating power in one place wouldn't be a problem if all Americans had the exact same ideals, desires, and needs. Ours, however, is an extremely diverse nation, which has been a huge source of strength for centuries, but also dooms any centralization to conflict.

The president's speech is case in point. Reasonable public-school parents who did not want their children exposed to potentially controversial proclamations or campaigning – or taxpayers who didn't want to fund it – had no choice but to take action. Meanwhile, reasonable parents who wanted their kids to hear a potentially uplifting address on hard work and perseverance had to fight to get their districts to show it. The political upheaval inevitable.

So how do we deal with this?

One of the things that has historically saved diverse Americans from crippling education conflict has been local control of schools. Communities of often like-minded people ran their own schools and taught shared values, preventing lots of potentially disastrous confrontations.

But it was hardly perfect. Where there wasn't homogeneity, conflict often ensued. Perhaps most striking were the 1844 "Philadelphia Bible Riots," in which a heated dispute over whose version of the Bible, Protestant of Catholic, would be permitted in the public schools resulted in shocking deaths and destruction.

Today, as districts have become much bigger and power has moved up the governmental ladder, conflict is constant. Whether the flashpoint is Intelligent Design, multiculturalism, sex education, or just what day the school year will begin, perfectly decent people are regularly forced to fight.

To solve the problem, we obviously don't need more centralization, though for several mistaken reasons some liberals and conservatives are demanding just that. No, what we need is the very opposite: school choice. Let parents choose schools that best meet their kids' needs and desires and that share their values. Rather than forcing diverse people to battle over government schools, let them educate their children with the freedom that is supposed to define American life.

If we do that – if we cease forcing people to fight – we can put this ugly speech brawl behind us, and ensure that nothing like it happens again.

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.

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.

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.

Last week brought news that Romney had secured a major publisher for his forthcoming book, No Apology: The Case for America's Greatness, in which Romney stands bravely against all those who insist that the United States is a mediocre country that's done more harm than good.

Even before the recent Palin and Sanford flameouts, Romney looked like the Right's favorite son for 2012. He'd garnered National Review's 2008 endorsement as a "full-spectrum conservative," and won the Conservative Political Action Conference's February 2009 straw poll handily.

With his square jaw and flawless salt-and-pepper hair, Romney certainly looks presidential: Like a character actor playing the president in a superhero movie -- or, less charitably, like a creature genetically engineered and grown in a vat for the sole purpose of securing the nation's highest office.

There's more to the presidency than looking the part, however. Conservatives ought to take a good look at the Romney record and ask themselves whether a man of such flexible convictions is the best they can do.

Romney professes to be appalled by what he calls Obama's international "tour of apology." Given Romney's pernicious influence on the health care debate, maybe he should go on an apology tour himself.

The health care reform package that Romney signed as Massachusetts governor in 2006 sought to provide universal coverage with a combination of individual and employer mandates and state subsidies.

Three years later, we have a record, and, as my colleague Mike Tanner demonstrates in a recent Cato study, it's nothing for Romney to be proud of. Despite fee increases and a cigarette tax increase -- and despite the fact that most of MassCare's costs are off-budget, imposed on the private sector -- the program's costs have grown much faster than projected, making up nearly one-third of Massachusetts' projected $1.3 billion 2009 deficit.

With health care costs skyrocketing, and insurance premiums rising at double the national average, "the state is considering caps on insurance premiums, cuts in reimbursements to providers, and even the possibility of a 'global budget' on health care spending."

Nonetheless, Romney continues to insist that MassCare is "a good model" for reform. Our current president seems to think so, too: As Tanner notes, Obama's approach to remaking health care is "substantially the same as Romney's."

Nor can libertarians be comfortable with Romney as limited government's standard-bearer. Asked in 2007 whether he shared President George W. Bush's belief that the president has the power to arrest and imprison American citizens without review, Romney said that he'd like to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before making a decision.

His foreign policy positions reflect a jingoistic (and increasingly unpopular) bellicosity, and he wants to increase an already-swollen Pentagon budget by $50 billion a year.

But Romney's biggest problem is this: It's difficult to tell what his core political principles are, if indeed he has any. Running for governor in 2002, Romney proclaimed "I will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose and am devoted and dedicated to honoring my word in that regard."

Three years later, with an eye toward the GOP primary electorate, he announced that he was pro-life. Sure, people change their minds, but Romney's rethinking always seems conveniently timed, as when he morphed from a Brady Bill and assault weapons ban supporter, to signing up as a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, just as his 2008 presidential campaign got under way.

The conservative temperament is uncomfortable with uncertainty. Maybe that's why conservatives tend to pick their candidate early: The front-runner at the beginning of the presidential primaries almost always becomes the GOP nominee.

But instead of looking desperately for a leader, perhaps the Right should relax a bit. Three years before the 2008 general election, Obama was a freshman senator who'd made one big speech, and virtually no one imagined he'd be the next president.

After a season of discontent, the limited-government movement has finally found its voice rallying opposition to the planned federal takeover of health care. Why, then, would the Right line up behind the architect of the reform scheme that's served as a model for Obamacare?

Although her selection represents the very worst of racial politics — she is not a leading light of the judiciary and would not have been considered had she not been a Hispanic woman — her career achievements show that the American Dream endures. While in this world it is rare for an underprivileged child from a minority group to attain a modicum of professional success — let alone reach its pinnacle — in America it happens again and again.

What makes the American Dream possible, however, is the rule of law — the idea that the rules of the games are fixed, so people can be secure in their life, liberty and property — which in this country is ultimately guaranteed by the Constitution. The Constitution provides for a very specific government structure, with checks on each branch's powers designed to maximize liberty and eliminate arbitrary and capricious rule.

To that end, officers of the judicial branch — judges — are to make their decisions irrespective of the race, religion or riches of those who come before them. And judges are to interpret the Constitution as written text.

If they set aside the text and rule based on their own notions of fairness, then they act as unelected legislators or, worse, extra-constitutional amenders of our founding document. If they believe that the Constitution is a "living" document that evolves with the times, then we should dispense with the pretense that they're following words on a page and debate the wisdom of having black-robed philosopher-kings.

Nominee Judge Sotomayor knew all this, which is why the testimony she gave at her confirmation hearings disclaimed many of her previous speeches and writings, even going so far as to reject President Obama's "empathy" standard — the idea that a judge applies the law differently when a litigant is sympathetic in some politically correct way.

While she was evasive most of the time — reason enough to vote against her — when she did say something about judicial philosophy, it was often indistinguishable from the words of John Roberts or Samuel Alito (as evidenced by the frustration of left-wing bloggers and pundits). And for good reason: In poll after poll, the American people overwhelmingly support a vision of the judicial role as one of enforcing the law as written, not of imposing their own policy preferences or vision of justice.

Kudos from this exercise go to those Republicans whose hard questions and thoughtful statements elevated the discussion of the Constitution beyond mere abstractions, so Americans could better understand the significance of ideological differences over the judicial role, or the use of foreign law in interpreting the Constitution, or property rights, or employment discrimination. In walking away from so many controversial positions, Sonia Sotomayor established a new standard to which all future nominees will at least have to pay lip service.

While confirmation was almost a foregone conclusion from the start because of the Democrats' strong Senate majority, the Republicans played well the cards they had been dealt. What was important was not that they voted against Judge Sotomayor — though, to borrow Sen. Arlen Specter's standard from President Clinton's impeachment trial, the case for her confirmation was "not proven" — but that they provoked, finally, a serious discussion about constitutional interpretation and jurisprudential philosophy.

And so the battle has been joined. It is now up to voters to show how much they care about what judges do and how they do it. We shall see whether their stated preference for jurists who are faithful to the Constitution translates to pressure on those who appoint, advise and consent on judicial nominations. Elections have consequences, and so ultimately only the democratic process will ensure that future justices, be they Latinas or old white men, really are wise.