bureaucracy

The reason why “drain the swamp” resonates with so many Americans is simple: It embodies their antipathy for the bloated, out-of-touch federal government.

I would be perfectly fine with – and actually feel a whole lot better – if the DoD created three backups of everything.  Maybe even four would be good.

You have, of course, spent the last decade-plus watching the entirety of the actually-private sector “go paperless.”

The Left doesn’t like acquiescing to the will of We the People. They like – to degree that they can pull it off – to PRETEND to acquiesce to the will of We the People.

This new book suggests that bureaucratic disdain and disregard for the public results, at least in part, from the wide gulf in the life experiences of ordinary Americans and the denizens of official Washington.

On July 4, 1776, American colonists declared their independence from a distant monarchy in Great Britain that had passed mandate after mandate without input from the people over which it ruled. Today, lawmakers and bureaucrats in Washington, DC and state capitals across the country pass mandates local schools hundreds or even thousands of miles away must obey or else face severe budget cuts.

Fire 75 percent of the federal bureaucracy. Today. Figure out who needs to be re-hired next week.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a decline in the level of trust in government, and a rise in distrust, to levels unprecedented in American history. But to think this is an entirely new phenomenon is a mistake: trust in government has steadily declined since the Great Society and the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson.

Despite its deep effects on the character of our nation, conservatives and the general population often ignore what children are learning except when their own are in school, so I thank everyone reading this debate and my worthy, tenacious opponent, Mike Petrilli, for your time and attention. National Common Core testing and curriculum mandates are destructive, overall, but one good side-effect is creating the opportunity to discuss what children will learn, and why.

Storm clouds have been gathering around the Common Core for some time. Until now, most of the critical attention has been on the political ramifications of the program, that it centralizes and federalizes teaching, diminishing the power of parents to participate in the educational process. When the criticism does turn to the content of the curriculum, it usually focuses on social studies, such as Joy Pullmann’s excellent account of the Common Core’s trashing of the Constitution and Founding Fathers. Yet the Common Core’s treatment of math is proving to be even more questionable.

Who could forget about the botched ObamaCare roll out of last fall by the Obama administration when on September 26 Obama said, “… most of the stories you’ll hear about how ObamaCare just can’t work is just not based on facts. Every time they have predicted something not working, it’s worked.” But when people did start shopping for insurance coverage on October 1, Healthcare.gov crashed.

Seventy years ago this month, on March 10, 1944, “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich A. Hayek was first published in Great Britain. For seven decades it has continued to challenge and influence the political-economic landscape of the world. Hayek delivered an ominous warning that political trends in the Western democracies, including America, were all in the direction of a new form of servitude that threatened the personal and economic liberty of the citizens of these countries.

In this podcast, The Heartland Institute Director of Communications, Jim Lakely and Senior Policy Analyst, Matthew Glans discuss Scott Cleland’s latest paper “A Modern Vision for the FCC.”