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"...It isn't the era of big government that's back, at least not among the people. It's just the irrepressible desire of the political class to extend the size, scope and power of the federal government..."

There is no longer any serious argument in favor of socialism, protectionism or capital controls.

FEMA, Americorps, EPA, OSHA, IRS, HUD, Dept. of Ed, Thought Crimes, WTO, BATF - what else do I have to say?

With $1.9 trillion a year and 1.8 million employees, the government failed to anticipate or prevent a terrorist attack on New York and Washington. It failed in its first duty. Why would we expand the powers of government just when government has demonstrated its inability to do its basic job?

There are many more examples, but this is a good place to start....

FMCDH

Chuck Schumer wouldn't know the truth if it smacked him in the face.

"Philosopher-statesman Pat Moynihan wrote at the time..."

A willing and smiling stepping stone for Hillary Clinton, could not be consideredeiter 'philosopher' or 'statesman'.

"Of course, the political class will not give up without a fight. Since Sept. 11, pols and pundits — from Sen. Chuck Schumer on the nanny-state left to Francis Fukuyama on the anti-science right — have declared that libertarianism is dead and the era of big government is back. It's an odd claim. The Sept. 11 attacks, after all, reflect a massive failure of the federal government. "

Sept. 11th, 2001 is the day that "big" government died. We have officially entered a new age where the size of an army or the destructive capabilities of nuclear responses no longer are sufficient enough to protect a nation's citizens. They couldn't protect us on Sept. 11th. They constantly remind us with their warnings of future "unstoppable" attacks that they are still unable to protect us presently and offer no hope that they ever will be able to in the future. If this is the case, sooner or later, perhaps after another "attack" or two, citizens are going to question the prudence of continuing as is. Upon further review, this means that security will take center stage everywhere and citizens will seek it at a more basic, local level. None of this bodes well for a large centralized concept of governance.

This is the primary threat to our nation, not the terrorism itself. I just don't know if it can be avoided.

I laugh at the crap posted daily on FR. I watch the BushFest posters, explain, and xplane, I watch the True Patriots bitch, whine, and moan. I watch the True Patriots be, belittled by the Bushies. I watch the left be belittled by the right. I watch the Bushites, who made their choice in '99 defend the Socialistic ideals of the current administration, actually become hipocratics.I watch the Orwellian agenda of Bush and Co. become the general Free Republic call to arms.

I can only hope that this call to worship, is recognized by others, and ignored.

In 1970, the Federal Register ran 20,000 pages. It's now running almost 80,000 pages annually. (It peaked around 85,000 pages in the tail end of the Carter administration. 8 Years of Reagan got it down to around 50,000 pages.) Considering that the Federal Register only prints new and changed regulations (as well as proposed regulations and a few other things), this suggests that the annual increase in regulations is about 4 times what it was as recently as 1970.

Most agree that the length of the FR is a reasonable "rough and ready" proxy for the degree of regulatory change. It says something about the intrusiveness of our government that one must measure the regulatory burden by the number of kilopages of new regulations published each year!

If anyone is unfamiliar with the FR, it's an 8-1/2 x 11 inch daily "magazine" published by the Government Printing Office that contains proposed, new and changed federal regulations (not laws; these are only "administrative" rules) along with a few other administrative notices. It is printed in VERY small type with tiny margins, so there are a lot of words on a page.

I believe that most agencies reduced the scope of their FR publication in the 1980's, such as publishing summaries of lengthy documents, so the increase in actual regulations likely exceeds 4:1.

A graph of Federal Regulation pages since 1940 can be found at http://www.mercatus.org/regulatoryaccounting.pdf

This article is wrong in a couple of places, but the most striking thing about it is the total concentration on economics, as if that is all that matters. This is typical of Libertarians, mainstream Conservatives, and Neo-cons alike. The truth is that Liberal-Leftist-Socialist ideas, disseminated by the medias, completely dominate the West. I read an interesting piece a while back that said the left really started winning in the 50s-60s when they shifted from what had been primarily economic theories to cultural theories, while the right, first under people like Bill Buckley and later under the Neo-cons, shifted from cultural to economic.