Reality. Reason. Rights.

Sen. Rand Paul reminds us that the debt compromise only cuts from the “baseline;” that is, it only cuts from projected increases so we’ll still be adding $7 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. As he says, this is sickening.

To paraphrase Jim DeMint: When you’re speeding toward the edge of a cliff, you don’t set the cruise control. You stop the car.

The current deal to raise the debt ceiling doesn’t stop us from going over the fiscal cliff. At best, it slows us from going over it at 80 mph to going over it at 60 mph.

This plan never balances. The President called for a “balanced approach.” But the American people are calling for a balanced budget.

Seriously people, we need a balanced budget amendment. Our leaders will never figure out on their own that they shouldn’t buy stuff they cannot afford. We need to force them to stop the car, revoke their license, and turn it around ourselves.

Back on April Fools’ Day, the Urban Dictionary Word of the Day was wikiot, a portmanteau of wiki and idiot. It is defined as “a fool who believes all information found on Wikipedia is accurate and true,” and it’s usage example is:

Michael Scott, from NBC’s The Office, upon claiming “Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information,” solidified himself among the ranks of wikiots.

I was reminded of this new term by a recent comment from Barney Frank, where he said:

“The trouble with new media is the fact that there’s no screen. Anyone can publish anything. We still have the notion that if it’s printed it has some validity. Previously, you had to convince at least one other person that it was worth printing. Now, anyone can print anything in this medium. In general, there’s a lot more gossip and fragmentation. People are starting to just get reinforcement in the media. On the left, it’s MSNBC, Fire Dog Lake and The Huffington Post. On the right, it’s Fox News and the talk radio hosts. People interpret facts differently through these parallel universes. It’s what makes compromise so hard because your partisans just think you’re selling them out because that’s what everyone they know says. It deepens and sharpens a partisan and ideological divide.”

While you would be a fool to believe everything you read on the internet, you’d be a bigger fool to believe we were better off before the advent of personal publishing, when there were only a few gatekeepers publishing only what matched their own agendas. So while the character Michael Scott’s line is funny, it reveals several truths about the internet.

The internet is the best thing ever precisely because anyone in the world can write anything they want. Lacking a screen isn’t the trouble with new media, it is what makes it great. And because of the self-correcting nature of the internet, I believe you do end up with the best possible information. Of course, there is a greater onus on the reader to verify sources and help determine what is the best possible information, but before the interent, that ability rested in the hands of a privileged few. With all the competition today, you don’t have to convince one person that your message is worth printing, you have to convince all of you readers everyday.

So why is Mr. Frank so upset with today’s newfangled technology? It’s because he and his ilk used to be the gatekeepers, the screeners, the censors. They’ve lost control over information dissemination and they are losing control of their power as a result. Ideas that used to be suppressed have the opportunity to thrive on the internet, as evidenced by the events of the Arab Spring. Care to venture a guess what might happen in China when the history of Tiananmen Square can no longer be censored?

Mr. Frank worries that the new media “deepens and sharpens a partisan and ideological divide.” This is a valid point, but it’s a good thing. The truth has a magical ability to make you pick sides. The MSM is dying because new media has laid bare the media bias and given people greater access to the truth.

With insight like this, let’s just be thankful that Mr. Frank doesn’t have the type of control over the internet as is currently being exercised in Syria, and previously in Egypt and Libya.

In Mitt Romney’s speech announcing his candidacy, he said, “we are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.”

First things first. I don’t exactly think Mitt Romney has any free market bona fides considering the state-wide takeover of healthcare he led in Massachusetts, which served as a beta release of Obamacare. Abridging the freedom of contract and forcing the individual mandate at the state level, as opposed to doing so at the federal level, does not make you a free marketer. He’s posing as the cure to our long march towards socialism, but he is part of the cancer.

But my real issue with his statement is, that by extension, it means we currently have a free market economy and are only just now approaching the point where that won’t be the case anymore. I beg to differ. We don’t have a free market economy. Sometimes calling it a mixed economy feels generous.

Our economy is manipulated (poorly) from the biggest overarching pieces like interest rates and monetary supply, to the smallest details like requiring a license to be a florist, to be an interior decorator, to braid hair, or to have a lemonade stand. Let’s explore just a taste of the unfree parts of our market that are in between these extremes.

• We are restricted to only buying health insurance in the state which we reside. Is this not ridiculous? What would a grapefruit cost a Minnesotan if they weren’t allowed to buy them from Florida or Texas?
• We have a government school monopoly that controls nearly 90% of the market, and that market share is increasing. By the way, Standard Oil was broken up with just a 68% market share (not that I believe the company should have been broken up). Can you imagine if supermarkets were like public schools, if groceries were paid for by taxes, and you were assigned a store based on where you live?
• Our executives have to be wary of being fired by government officials, such as our CEO-in-chief, rather than answering to customers and share holders.
• Winners and losers are picked by government officials, instead of being allowed to succeed or fail depending on their value to consumers. Obvious examples here are the bank and auto bailouts, the latter of which has ended up costing taxpayers $14 billion. Let’s not forget all of the subsidized industries and products like ethanol, the Chevy Volt, certain window manufacturers, and the housing market in general.
• Contracts and  bankruptcy law are sidestepped for the benefit of unsecured creditors (i.e. unions) over the rights of secured creditors.
• Officials try to dictate where manufacturing plants can open in order to pander to unions.

Of course, in a country where 1 in 3 need government permission to do their job, as opposed to 1 in 20 sixty years ago, I could go on and on. We aren’t “inches away” from losing our free market status. We blew past that line ages ago and we are now watching the mile markers zip by.

If I could afford to buy the men and women of our military and intelligence communities a round of drinks for their unwavering dedication resulting in last night’s news, I would. Hopefully this simple message will suffice; congratulations and thank you for introducing Osama Bin Laden to the long arm of American justice.

The moral of the story in this Seuss-esque poem is that when you’re in a hole, you need to quit digging. Be sure to enjoy the whole thing, but here’s a snippet of The jubjub hole:

So there they all stood, pointing fingers and yelling
While below them the black hole kept growing and swelling.
And then at the moment of greatest confusion
The panel announced it had reached a conclusion:
The Kingdom of Whatsis was bound for disaster.
The Spendits all nodded, then Spent even faster.

No, I’m not actually celebrating Tax Day, but there is something to be happy about. The internet has exposed the Leftward bias in the media, it is helping to take down the MSM, it has served as a backbone for those striving for freedom, and it is now a check against those willing to commit genocide. This is all possible because the internet has knocked down the barriers for spreading information. So on Tax Day let’s celebrate an increased awareness of what our government spends the money it takes from us on.

Thanks to Google and some of their partners we can see a very detailed view of where our money goes. Take a look at some of the entries in the Data Viz Challenge:

• Where Did My Tax Dollars Go?
• Every Day is Tax Day
• Can I Get A Receipt With That?
• What Do You Work For?

Having a good idea of where our money goes is one step in the right direction, but I can think of two more steps to take to really get people making decisions based on this information. First, Tax Day should coincide with election season. And second, we could end automatic withholding of taxes from our paychecks. If Americans had to turn over 20-30% of their yearly earnings to the government in one lump sum, out of their own bank accounts, and then went out to vote a week or two later, I think we’d see some interesting results at the polls. An added bonus of the second step is that tax payers could invest their money throughout the year and make a few bucks before the tax man comes to takes it away.

Can you afford to spend 8 times more than your monthly revenue? I didn’t think so. But our government did just that in the month of March, and it’s poised to continue down the same reckless path. If you’re spending 90% of your monthly revenue, you should probably take that as a warning sign that it’s time to scale back. But 800% is ridiculous. How many warning signs did they have to miss to get to this level of spending?

“I’m really concerned,” [Erskine] Bowles told the committee last month. “I think we face the most predictable economic crisis in history. A lot of us sitting in this room didn’t see this last crisis as it came upon us. But this one is really easy to see. The fiscal path we are on today is simply not sustainable.”

As predictable as this problem is, some still choose to ignore it because it conflicts with their ideology. But for others, maybe the numbers have grown to such absurd levels that they just don’t make sense anymore. A trillion here, and a trillion there? It’s like we are playing with Monopoly money now.

To bring some perspective to these astronomical numbers, it helps to measure them against some that are easier to comprehend. For this we turn to Iowahawk, with Feed Your Family on $10 Billion a Day, and the following video from Declaration Entertainment based on the same post.

Governments simply can’t be trusted to do the right thing. That’s why we have a Constitution in the first place. Our Constitution limits our government to specific, enumerated powers. Of course, these limits are sidestepped all the time in the name of “security” or “emergency” as we yield our liberty and government gains ground.

But since this is the natural progress of things, it is our responsibility to see that the government stays within the confines of the Constitution. I believe that the best way to turn the tide of government overreach is a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Government overreach is largely made possible by its ability to borrow against the future. If government is allowed to spend more than it brings in, it will. There is no evidence to the contrary. Since government cannot be trusted to constrain its own spending, deficit spending should be made illegal.

The government should “shut down” until it learns this simple lesson. But it won’t learn it without our help. We need a balanced budget amendment.

Governor Scott Walker exposes the problems with unionized labor with this simple example:

In 2010, Megan Sampson was named an Outstanding First Year Teacher in Wisconsin. A week later, she got a layoff notice from the Milwaukee Public Schools. Why would one of the best new teachers in the state be one of the first let go? Because her collective-bargaining contract requires staffing decisions to be made based on seniority.

Unionized public labor (public employment in general, really) creates market distortions like this all of the time. Can you imagine a Rookie of the Year getting cut because he doesn’t have seniority? Or can you imagine the most incompetent employee getting paid a full salary for years on end, without doing a minute of work, because he has tenure? When you impede market forces, ridiculous and unintended consequences like this happen.

Public employees are living in a bubble. They have become a protected class thanks to the feedback loop buttressed by collective bargaining where politicians steal more money from the taxpayer, who hand it over to the unions, who in turn spend it on elections for politicians that will continue the cycle.

Tenure and guaranteed job security, pay based on seniority instead ability, defined benefit pension plans, and the like are all foreign ideas to the vast majority of Americans who work in the private sector and are actually accountable to their employers. Popping this bubble, and allowing the market to work, is the best and only moral way to fix the problems in education.