Thursday, June 30, 2011

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Collars for Dollars

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Collars for Dollars

How the drug war sacrifices real policing for easy arrests.

In the police world, there are good arrests and better arrests, but there is no such thing as a bad arrest. In recent years, measures of “productivity” have achieved an almost totemic significance. And because they are so easy to count, arrests have come to outweigh more important but harder-to-quantify variables such as crimes prevented, fights mitigated, or public fears assuaged.

There’s an argument that putting pressure on rank-and-file officers to make lots of arrests is a good thing. After all, we pay police to arrest criminals. But there’s a difference between quantity and quality. Quantity is easy to influence, and the rank and file can easily increase their output of discretionary arrests for minor offenses like loitering, disorderly conduct, and possession of marijuana. They are also influenced by what is known in New York as “collars for dollars”: Arrest numbers are influenced by the incentive of overtime pay for finishing up paperwork and appearing in court.

Police would love to arrest only “real” criminals, but that isn’t easy. It’s difficult to find a good criminal. There’s never a felon around when you need one. Fishing for low-level drug arrests is a far easier way to generate overtime.

When I worked in Baltimore, officers would pull up on a drug corner and stop the slowest addict walking away. While conducting a perfectly legal “Terry Frisk”—a cursory search nominally conducted for officer safety—cops would feel some drugs in a pocket. That easy arrest and lockup likely meant two hours of overtime pay.

In some cities, like New York, it’s trickier. Overtime for court testimony is harder to get, and the state’s highest court has ruled—precisely to prevent the Baltimore-style approach—that feeling drugs during a Terry Frisk does not allow an officer to search that pocket and remove those drugs. The court reasoned that the drugs are not a threat to the officer’s safety, and safety is the only justification for these sorts of frisks.

In New York state, small-scale possession of marijuana is virtually decriminalized. It’s not even an arrestable offense. But police in need of overtime are nothing if not wily. So a group of officers might approach a man in a high-crime neighborhood and, in no uncertain terms, “ask” him to empty his pockets. Fearful, resigned, or simply taking the path of least resistance, the suspect might do so, and in the process he might reveal a small “dime bag” of weed. While possessing that amount of marijuana is not an arrestable offense, it becomes one as soon as the drug is placed in “public view.”

Supporters sometimes say these small-scale drug arrests are part of a “broken windows” approach to preventing crime. This tactic comes from an influential 1982 Atlantic magazine article by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson that combined the 19th century police theories of Robert Peel with the 20th century urban philosophy of Jane Jacobs. The idea is that if you take care of the little things—disorder, quality-of-life issues, and public fear—then the big things like robbery and murder will take care of themselves.

Since Police Commissioner William Bratton implemented a broken windows policing strategy in the early 1990s, homicides in New York dropped more than 80 percent. But the crime didn’t drop because police were cracking down on drug users; overall, illegal drug use is as high as ever. When the murder rate was falling fastest in the 1990s, police never arrested more than a few thousand people per year for public-view marijuana. Only after the crime drop slowed did police turn to small-scale drug arrests to meet their “productivity goals.” It’s as if real criminals became too difficult to find, and the addiction to overtime pay remained strong as ever.

Last year in New York City, 50,300 people—mostly young black and Hispanic men—were arrested solely for misdemeanor “public-view” possession of marijuana. It’s true that some may have been up to no good. And some might have been walking down the street proudly smoking a spliff in front of the police. But nobody really believes this accounts for most of those 50,300 lockups. Many were people just going about their business, intending to smoke later, in private, in the very manner the law was intended to decriminalize.

“What is it with the drugs?” a man once asked me while I was policing a 7-11 for coffee, “When there’s shootin’ or fightin’, you don’t seem to care! But when there’s drugs, you come right away.” It’s a fair question to ask. Why do we do it? What do we gain? Especially when we know drug arrests are expensive and turn a lot of otherwise law-abiding citizens into cop-hating criminals?

The drug war, because it can’t be won, encourages outward signs of police effectiveness at the expense of good old-fashioned policing. Hard-working cops, especially those who ask for little more than a middle-class income in return for the dangerous work they do, turn to drug arrests to make ends meet. The Baltimore sergeant was right: Police officers do need to work for their government check. It’s a shame “collars for dollars” has become the easiest way to do it.

Peter Moskos (moskos@gmail.com), a former Baltimore police officer, is an assistant professor of law and political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York's Doctoral Program in Sociology, and LaGuardia Community College's Department of Social Science. He is the author of In Defense of Flogging (2011) and Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District (2008)

Big Daddy

Big Daddy

The government should let parents regulate their children's entertainment.

Different parents have different standards, and the same parents are likely to have different standards for different children, depending on their age, maturity, and personality. Because of this diversity, policies that aim to bolster parental authority by restricting minors' access to material the government deems inappropriate, such as the California video game law that the Supreme Court overturned this week, would be doomed to fail even if they did not violate the First Amendment.

California's law made selling or renting a "violent video game" to a minor a civil offense punishable by a $1,000 fine. It covered games "in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being," depicted in a way that "a reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors," that is "patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable for minors," and that "causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

The thing about reasonable people, of course, is that they may disagree, especially on such abstruse issues as whether a video game appeals to a minor's "deviant or morbid interest," whatever that might be. "Prevailing standards in the community," which determine what is "patently offensive," are likewise a matter of dispute. Pretending that everyone in California agrees about "what is suitable for minors," or sees eye to eye on the redeeming value of violent entertainment, does not make it so.

The one thing all parents probably do agree on is that teenagers should not be treated like toddlers. Yet that is what California's legislators decided to do, decreeing one (indeterminate) standard for everyone under 18. The industry's game ratings, by contrast, draw six distinctions based on age and use 30 "content descriptors" to indicate the nature of potentially objectionable material.

Since parents can use these ratings to regulate what their children play (and can even use system settings to block games with certain ratings), what was the motivation for California's law? "California cannot show that the Act's restrictions meet a substantial need of parents who wish to restrict their children’s access to violent video games but cannot do so," the Supreme Court concluded.

"Not all of the children who are forbidden to purchase violent video games on their own have parents who care whether they purchase violent video games," Justice Antonin Scalia noted in the majority opinion, questioning the premise that "punishing third parties for conveying protected speech to children just in case their parents disapprove of that speech is a proper governmental means of aiding parental authority." He suggested that the main effect of the law was to enforce "what the State thinks parents ought to want"—the opposite of respecting parental authority.

On the same day the Court overturned California's video game law, it agreed to consider a First Amendment challenge to the federal ban on broadcast indecency, another policy that imposes government-determined standards of propriety in the name of helping parents protect their children. It features the same sort of constitutionally problematic vagueness and subjectivity yet applies to adults as well as minors, banning "patently offensive" material related to sex or excretion between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

Like California's law, which arbitrarily distinguished between video games and other forms of violent entertainment, the indecency ban is "wildly underinclusive," applying to broadcast TV and radio but not to programming carried by cable, satellite, or the Internet. In both cases the solution is not to expand the government's cultural regulations but to privatize them by letting people raise their own children.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist

The Unseen War on American Farms

Stephen Colbert Lampoons the First Amendment

Stephen Colbert Lampoons the First Amendment

The Comedy Central host receives government approval to form a political action committee.

Steve Dingledine, a 43-year-old Washington resident, arrived at 5:45 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the faux-newsman. Colbert is a “court jester par excellence,” Dingledine declared, but he said he also hopes that the comedian's shtick will shift public opinion. “The awareness is going to be raised to a point where the loophole cannot be exploited by media companies,” the Colbert groupie said.

What advocates of strict campaign finance regulation call a “loophole,” others call protected political speech under the First Amendment. In May, Colbert submitted an advisory opinion request through an attorney asking the FEC to sanction his political action committee.

The central question was whether Comedy Central’s corporate parent company, Viacom, had to report administrative assistance to the PAC and potential payments to air political ads on other television stations. FEC lawyers submitted three different drafts responding to Colbert, and the agency ultimately approved a compromise version allowing Colbert to claim the “press exemption” to campaign finance law. Viacom must therefore report PAC involvement not relating to the late-night program, including logistical support for the PAC and advertising placement on other networks.

Inside the packed hearing room, Colbert’s request didn’t sound like an effort to open a loophole for laughs. A subdued Colbert was nearly mute as his lawyer, Trevor Potter, blandly answered commissioners’ questions with only brief interjections from his client. After all the hype, Colbert’s appearance seemed anti-climatic, in contrast to his cheering fans waiting outside.

By 9:30 a.m., more than 30 of those fans were standing in line, along with a few campaign finance lawyers and Capitol Hill staffers. Six “coordinators” clad in red t-shirts reading “COLBERT SUPER PAC” arrived with signs to energize the crowd. Four Department of Homeland Security officers, who were there to provide security, told the redshirts that no “signs or protests were allowed” in the FEC hearing room. The redshirts assured the police that they planned to remain on the sidewalk’s de facto free speech zone.

Back inside, only one of the six commissioners broke with his colleagues to question the wisdom of the two-tiered set of rules for media corporations and other companies. Don McGahn, an iconoclastic Republican, challenged the authority of the commission to decide who gets a government-approved press license in an age of creative destruction in the media industry.

The FEC has grappled with the definition of the press for decades. In 1980, the FEC investigated Reader’s Digest for making an “illegal corporate expenditure to negatively influence” the 1980 presidential election after the magazine distributed a video reenactment of the Chappaquiddick car wreck involving then-candidate Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). After a long investigation, the case was dismissed in 1981.

Almost 20 years later, the FEC granted a media exemption to the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, which meant the Republican-leaning group no longer had to disclose its spending on certain production expenses. Citizens United was the plaintiff in the blockbuster 2010 Supreme Court case holding that the government may not restrict the independent speech of companies and advocacy groups. If Citizens United need not disclose its spending on documentaries and certain ads as a press entity, why should Viacom and Colbert have to?

“Commentary is a slippery concept, and I’m having trouble being the one who decides what is commentary and what is not commentary. We’re in an interesting era now, post-Citizens United,” McGahn said, citing bloggers and other non-traditional journalists. McGahn also rejected the notion that corporations gained First Amendment rights in Citizens United, arguing that media corporations have long enjoyed the unfettered ability to engage in political advocacy through editorial boards and TV talking heads.

Campaign finance lawyers have speculated that the FEC’s advisory opinion may spur FOX News or Current TV, an Al Gore-owned network featuring former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, to engage in politics through the super PAC model. McGahn registered his objections by voting unanimously with his colleagues to approve one version of the advisory opinion but withholding his vote from the final version that the FEC officially approved.

Colbert mingled with FEC commissioners and staff in a conference room during a brief recess after the vote. An agency lawyer, who chatted with Colbert in the men’s restroom, asked the comedian about the mass of people waiting for him outside the building. “There are a lot of crazy people out there,” he replied. Colbert emerged from the building just before 11 a.m. to address a throng of 150 or so of those crazies, plus gawking journalists and “federal employees with extremely generous lunch break policies,” as he put it.

“Hello freedom lovers! I am here to represent your voice, so please quiet down so we can all hear what you have to say with my mouth,” he said during the three-minute press conference. “There will be [those] that say, ‘Stephen Colbert, what will you do with that unrestricted Super PAC money?’ To which I say, ‘I don’t know. Give it to me and let’s find out.’”

Colbert finished with a fundraising pitch to prime the pump of his super PAC.

“I don’t know about you, but I do not accept limits on my free speech!” said Colbert, who was chauffeured by an ethanol-guzzling Cadillac. “I do not accept the status quo! I do accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express—$50 or less please, because then I don’t have to keep a record of who gave it to me.”

Jeff Patch is a writer and political consultant based in Alexandria, Virginia

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch Discuss the End of the Two-Party System wi...

Nick Gillespie Discusses The Declaration of Independents on Fox News' Re...

Mayor Ed Koch on rent control

Reason.tv: Mayor Ed Koch on rent control, his sexuality, Andrew Cuomo, and how he helped save New York

In 1978, New York City was crumbling and the leading indicator of America's seemingly irreversible decline. The South Bronx, once a thriving middle-class neighborhood, had became a national symbol of urban horror. From 1960 to 1980, New York's murder rate tripled. Out-of-control spending had brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy, leading to a state takeover of its finances. The city's subway was plauged by crime, graffiti, and equipment breakdowns.

On July 13th, 1977, the city reached its nadir when a 24-hour blackout gave way to mass looting. Bushwick, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, was practically burned to the ground.

Then in 1978, Edward Irving Koch became New York's 105th Mayor.

A veteran congressman from Manhattan, Koch’s chutzpah was exactly what the city needed. A self-proclaimed "liberal with sanity," Koch took on special interests, he put the city’s finances back in order, and showed that it was not only possible to govern but to have fun doing it.

Koch gained a national reputation by being the quintessential New Yorker: A Bronx-born ethnic whose disparaging remarks about life outside the city may well have sunk his 1981 bid for the governor’s mansion in Albany. Long presumed to be gay, Koch kept mum about his personal life while pushing for social tolerance. His symbolic and practical role in the Big Apple's multi-decade renaissance is as huge as his appetite for publicity.

Since losing his bid for a fourth term in 1989, Koch has been a tireless dilettante. He’s written books and hosted his own radio show. He was Judge Wapner’s first replacement on the People’s Court. He started a nonprofit to clean up corruption in the state capital. He turned his passion for film into an avocation as a movie reviewer, first for a community paper called the West Side Spirit, and now on the YouTube Channel, The Mayor at the Movies.

Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie sat down with Mayor Koch at his office in Midtown in April 2011 for a wide ranging discussion about rent control, the Tea Party, Donald Trump, his sexuality, whether Gov. Andrew Cuomo coined the phrase "Vote for Cuomo not the Homo," his memories of World War II, and how he "gave New York City back its morale" (as the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan put it).

Approximately 18 minutes.

Produced, shot, and edited by Jim Epstein, with help from Lucas Newman. Additional camera by Anthony Fisher.

Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions, and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTubeChannel to receive notifications when new content goes live.

Nanny State Propaganda

Nanny State Propaganda

How long before the government places graphic warning labels on junk food?

Don’t get too used to those graphic new cigarette warnings Washington regulators unveiled last week. They’re going to disappear one way or the other.

The courts might throw them out on First Amendment grounds. That seems unlikely. But if the judicial branch doesn’t get rid of them, the executive branch will. Not because it decided they were too repulsive. No, federal authorities plan to update the warning labels to keep the shock value fresh.

"We’ll begin . . . studies to make sure that we are keeping people sensitized," says Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius. "What may seem quite shocking at the beginning, people get used to quite quickly." So if people build up a tolerance for the repulsive, the FDA will amp the dial up to grotesque.

Although the placement of graphic warning labels on commercial products is novel in the U.S., government’s use of the gross-out is nothing new. Wartime propaganda posters of an earlier age routinely depicted the enemy as monstrous beasts to be slain or subhuman bugs to be exterminated.

Of course, no one backing the new warning labels would call them propaganda. Rather, the FDA’s Lawrence Deyton says, "We are trying to communicate accurate, truthful information about the health impact of smoking, to allow consumers to be informed."

That is a lie. The old warnings—informing buyers that cigarettes cause cancer, and so forth—conveyed information. The new labels are designed to provoke a reaction in that lizard part of your brain thoughts never reach. A warning on a ladder that reads, "Caution: Improper use could lead to serious injury from falling" conveys information. A graphic photo of a compound tibia fracture conveys only sentiment.

It’s the kind of cheap trick you could play with just about anything. Take exercise. Sporting-equipment companies glamorize it just as cigarette companies glamorize smoking, with beautiful idols looking too cool for school as they engage in the activity. But you could de-glamorize exercise in a hurry by forcing people to view pictures of dislocated shoulders, torn ligaments, and genitals covered in raging cases of jock itch.

Since the gross-out is cross-functional, it’s reasonable to ask when the federal government will start showing us disgusting pictures on packages of food, in which Washington also takes a keen interest. Indeed, someone asked Sibelius that very question during a press conference about the cigarette labels. Her response was evasive. Food labels are voluntary, she said. And tobacco is unique because smoking is "the No. 1 cause of preventable death."

It won’t be No. 1 forever. Obesity is gaining ground fast. Sibelius says smoking imposes "$200 billion a year in health costs." According to the Centers for Disease Control, obesity costs the U.S. about $150 billion. Ergo, Sibelius says the government has an interest in food because "it has a lot to do with underlying health costs and [the] overall health of our nation. . . . The work around obesity and healthier, more nutritious eating" will be "an ongoing focus."

Do tell. Already the federal government has organized an Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children in "an effort to combat childhood obesity – the most serious health crisis facing today’s youth."

The working group—comprising the FTC, the CDC, the FDA, and the Agriculture Department—already has proposed that food companies either (a) change their child-centered products to make them healthier or (b) lose the right to advertise them. The proposal is ostensibly voluntary. But then so is paying the Mafia protection money not to burn down your store.

In brief, the arc of food regulation seems to be following the arc of tobacco regulation: "voluntary" measures imposed "for the sake of the children" at first—followed by less voluntary, more comprehensive regulation undertaken for the sake of the common good, defined in both public-health terms and public-finance terms. What’s more, the same assumption holds in both cases: The government should direct personal behavior that has any effect on other people. Since any behavior can be said to affect somebody else in some way, this is a recipe for a government of infinite scope.

Two days after Washington unveiled its new warning labels for cigarette packages, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study reporting that our food choices influence our weight more than exercise does. And potato chips pack on the pounds faster than any other food, including candy and desserts.

The logic of Washington’s new cigarette warning labels holds that government should frighten people away from consumer goods that impose social costs. If we apply that consistently, then there is no reason federal regulators should not adorn bags of potato chips with garish photos of morbidly obese corpses, cutaways of clogged ateries, or glistening mounds of fatty tissue hacked out of cadavers.

If that doesn’t slim America down enough, then perhaps Washington also will make everybody exercise for an hour a day. The idea sounds laughably implausible now. So what? As Secretary Sibelius says: "What may seem quite shocking at the beginning, people get used to quite quickly."

A. Barton Hinkle is a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. This article originally appeared at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Stimulus to Nowhere

Stimulus to Nowhere

The failure of Obama's economic agenda

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Mired in excruciating negotiations over the budget and the debt ceiling, President Barack Obama might reflect that things didn't have to turn out this way. The impasse grows mainly out of one major decision he made early on: pushing through a giant stimulus.

When he took office in January 2009, this was his first priority. The following month, Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with a price tag eventually put at $862 billion.

It was, he said at the time, the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history," and would "create or save three and a half million jobs over the next two years."

The president was right about the first claim. As a share of gross domestic output, it was the largest fiscal stimulus program ever tried in this country. But the second claim doesn't stand up so well. Today, total nonfarm employment is down by more than a million jobs.

What Obama didn't foresee is that his program would spark a populist backlash and give rise to the tea party. Where would Michele Bachmann be if the stimulus had never been enacted—or if it had been a brilliant success?

To say it has not been is to understate the obvious. The administration says the results look meager because the economy was weaker than anyone realized. Maybe so, but fiscal policy is a clumsy and uncertain tool for stimulating growth, which the past two years have not vindicated.

The package had three main components: tax cuts, aid to state governments, and spending on infrastructure projects. Tax cuts would induce consumers to buy stuff. State aid would prop up spending by keeping government workers employed. Infrastructure outlay would generate hiring to build roads, bridges, and other public works.

That was the alluring theory, which vaporized on contact with reality. The evidence amassed so far by economists indicates that the stimulus has come up empty in every possible way.

Consider the tax cuts. Wage-earners saw their take-home pay rise as the IRS reduced withholding. But as with past rebates and one-time tax cuts, consumers proved reluctant to perform their assigned role.

Claudia Sahm of the Federal Reserve Board and Joel Slemrod and Matthew Shapiro of the University of Michigan found that only 13 percent of households indicated they would spend most of the windfall. The rest said they preferred to put it in the bank or pay off debts—neither of which boosts the sale of goods and services.

This puny yield was even worse than that of the 2008 tax rebate devised by President George W. Bush. Neither attempt, the study reported, "was very effective in stimulating spending in the near term."

The idea behind channeling money to state governments is that it would reduce the paring of government payrolls, thus preserving the spending power of public employees. But the plan went awry, according to a paper by Dartmouth College economists James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

"Transfers to the states to support education and law enforcement appear to have little effect," they concluded. Most likely, they said, states used the money to avoid raising taxes or borrowing money.

That's right: The federal government took out loans that it will have to cover with future tax increases ... so states don't have to. It's like paying your Visa bill with your MasterCard.

The public works component could have been called public non-works. It sounds easy for Washington to pay contractors to embark on "shovel-ready projects" that needed only money to get started. The administration somehow forgot that even when the need is urgent, the government moves at the speed of a glacier.

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A New Day in Politics

A New Day in Politics

How libertarianism can fix what's wrong with America

Most Americans used to call themselves Republican or Democrat. These days, more call themselves independent. What does that mean for American politics? A lot.

"Independents are everywhere, and they're becoming the largest single voting bloc in the country," Reason magazine Editor Matt Welch says. " (T)hey can determine every national election and every ... election for state office. So independent voters—people who refuse to say, 'I'm a Republican or I'm a Democrat'—that's where all the action is."

Welch and Reason.tv Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie just published a book on what to expect from this change: The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America.

The big change they see stems from independents' refusal to be absorbed by any party. "Compare the tea party to the ... Howard Dean antiwar movement," Welch said. "Howard Dean became the chairman (of the) Democratic National Committee. But the tea party has kept an arm's length and said, 'No, we're not going to be Republicans. ... (W)e're going to focus on ... government spending, deficit, and debt, and that's it.' ... And by maintaining that independence they have retained power."

"Independence in politics means that you can actually dictate some of the terms to our overlords," Welch and Gillespie write, adding that we need independence not just in politics but from politics. Welch said, "When we look at the places where government either directly controls or heavily regulates things, like K-12 education, health care, retirement, things are going poorly."

It's very different outside of government where—from culture to retail stores to the Internet—there's been an explosion of choice. "(Y)ou were lucky ... 20 years ago (if) you would see one eggplant in an exotic store," Welch continued. "Now in the crappiest supermarket in America you'll see four or five or six varieties of eggplant, plus all types of different things. ... (W)hen you get independent from politics, things are going great because people can experiment, they can innovate. ... We should squeeze down the (number of) places where we need a consensus to the smallest area possible, because all the interesting stuff happens outside of that."

Government is a zero-sum game: Someone wins, and someone loses, unlike in the market, where it's win-win, where merchant and customer thank each other. "Anytime that you have the government expressing anything," Welch continued, "it's a battle of values. If a government is supporting an art show, people who find that art offensive have a legitimate claim. If a government buys ... a new baseball stadium, well, my wife hates baseball, so how is that fair to her?"

"Fifty-one percent of the people get to tell the other 49 percent what to do, how much to pay, where you have to show up," Gillespie added. In the private sector, everybody gets to pick what he or she wants.

"There are troubles and tradeoffs," Gillespie said. "But ... if somebody starts selling stuff you don't like, you don't hold a rally and you don't try and get a bunch of people to vote to change it. You go to the next grocery store ... or you build your own grocery store. It's hard to do that with schools ... with health care and ... retirement." Of course, as government makes more decisions for people and limits competition, it reduces our choices. It's also given us horrible, unsustainable debt.

But, surprisingly, the Reason folks are optimistic.

"There are cases (of big government rollbacks)," Gillespie said. "New Zealand did this. Canada did this. The U.S. did this after World War II—dramatically ramped down the amount of spending, both in absolute terms and in relative terms as a percentage of economic activity. Political change happens."

But for now, the politicians continue to move us in the wrong direction. Last year, the feds alone added another 80,000 pages of rules. Despite talk of cuts, spending keeps growing. So does the debt.

And yet maybe the optimists are right. Maybe the human spirit is so powerful it will overcome the stupidity of politics.

I sure hope so.

John Stossel is host of Stossel on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of Give Me a Break and of Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity. To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.

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