United Liberty

Over at Real Clear Politics (a daily read for me), Jeremy Lott notes some of the victories libertarians have achieved over the last couple years:

The last several years have not been easy for libertarians to stomach. The U.S. government, which had bloated under President George W. Bush and a Republican Congress - the annual budget had climbed from $2 to $3 trillion under Bush and that didn’t count much off-budget military spending - has grown even more under President Barack Obama and his Democrats.

Over at the American Spectator, Doug Bandow notes that despite the complaining of many members of Congress and bureaucrats, only a fraction of the government was affected by the recent snowstorms:

In theory the government closure is costing all of us. Some 230,000 D.C. area employees stayed home, costing an estimated $300 million “in lost productivity per day,” according to federal officials. But is the shutdown really hurting the public?

Using the term “productivity” in the same sentence as “federal government” is a dubious exercise. No doubt, in the sense of performing a task efficiently, the Feds can be productive. Just watch how quickly and completely the IRS attempts to clean out the average taxpayer. That explains the joke about Washington’s preferred tax form of just two lines: “How much do you earn? Send it in.”

But government efficiency doesn’t mean productivity in a larger sense. That is, does government activity yield a better life for Americans? On net, the answer is no. The only problem with Snowmaggedon is that it has not affected the 85 percent of federal employees who work outside of the D.C. area.
[…]
If you believe the official estimates, the three day federal shut-down cost Americans nearly a billion dollars. But don’t worry. Although Snowmaggedon has been awful for those of us who live in the region, it likely has saved the American people billions of dollars by slowing down the waste of tax dollars and limiting the harm of regulations.

Now if we could only shut down Washington permanently.

This is how large we’ve allowed the federal government to get, and Bandow breaks down each department’s employment. While we joke around that “snowpocalypse” has brought Washington, DC to a stand still, it has barely slowed down the monster.

During Snowpocalypse 2009, a group of people got together for a Twitter-organized snowball fight when an off duty police officer’s Hummer was hit during the fun. He stopped his car and had a heated exchange with the crowd, in which he brandished his weapon.

You can watch video the incident below. More details are available at Reason:

A new study shows that school vouchers in DC bring better results at a fraction of the cost:

The latest federal study of the D.C. voucher program finds that voucher students have pulled significantly ahead of their public school peers in reading and perform at least as well as public school students in math. It also reports that the average tuition at the voucher schools is $6,620. That is ONE QUARTER what the District of Columbia spends per pupil on education ($26,555), according to the District’s own fiscal year 2009 budget.

Better results at a quarter the cost. And Democrats in Congress have sunset its funding and are trying to kill it. Shame on them.

Today the Barr Campaign released a video of Bob talking about John McCain’s ‘Maverick’ credentials. I would agree with his assessment: if John McCain is a political maverick, who isn’t? Considering how many establishment candidates have been talking about ‘Changing Washington’ since the primaries, I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised.