control

Could something like China’s social credit system happen in America?

John Nothdurft and Donny Kendal present episode #115 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s podcast features input from Director of Communications Jim Lakely, Director of Publications Sam Karnick, as well as work from the Tax Foundation.

When government “helps” run something – that something is terrible. The bigger a hand government has in running it – the more terrible it is. If it is exclusively government-run – the terrible-ness is ingrained and inherent. And the longer government runs the show – the worse the terrible-ness becomes.

A new digital system unveiled by Oklahoma government police is just the latest example of civil asset forfeiture laws encouraging cops to become the robbers they’re supposed to be catching.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, we listen in as Project Manager for Education Transformation Lennie Jarratt speaks in front of the Great Homeschool Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. He discusses Common Core and its effect on homeschooling.

The daily and unending bombardment of political campaign reporting and news, with its “drama” about who will be the Republican and Democratic Party candidates for the U.S. presidency, hides from view the continuing and real choice facing the American public: freedom or statism, individual liberty or government control.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Randal O’Toole, economic analyst at the Cato Institute, joins Host H. Sterling Burnett to talk about how the incentive structure facing public lands managers has resulted in mismanagement and the armed conflicts we saw in Nevada and Oregon.

Based on the best available scientific evidence, it is highly unlikely continued fossil fuel use will result in catastrophic changes to Earth’s climate or will cause harm to humans or the environment. Despite the available evidence, governments in the United States and other industrialized nations seem intent on pushing the development and use of politically favored renewable energy sources, particularly wind and solar power, through the use of subsidies and mandates.

The reason most often cited for the success of the nonpolitical candidates is the frustration with Washington; the sense that the system is broken. Voters feel that we have no control and that government has gone wild. Even people who don’t watch the news or closely follow politics are aware of the “overreach.” It seems that, perhaps, the messages the outsiders have been heralding on the trail has caught on.

Our first major clues of the changes our president had in mind were evident in those he chose for his cabinet. Victor Davis Hanson mentioned some of Obama’s questionable liberal choices in an article that described the “worst of the worst.” However, he missed Arnie Duncan, Secretary of Education, who ushered in the controversial Common Core Standards.

Twenty-nine states, more than half the stars on the American flag, have filed lawsuits against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for redefining the “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, erasing “navigable” and usurping states’ rights by including local seasonal streams, farm irrigation ponds, roadside ditches, and even “connective” dry lands placed under authority of the Clean Water Act.

Democrat Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) just penned an editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle. That has the patchouli whiff of her writing while sitting at the corner of Haight and Ashbury – in August 1968. It is warmed-over Hippie-Dippie, Flower Power, Socialist nonsense.

How many times has government royally messed up something? And not fired anyone? Or done anything that remotely resembles improving their performance? Oh so very often. In part because they don’t care – once they have the power, they don’t care what happens to us. In part because they are too busy planning their next grabs.