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SOME FAVORITE VIRGINIANS OF MINE who inspired and crafted our federal Constitution?Mason, Madison, Jefferson, and Henry?also drafted the Constitution of Virginia. And in the latter, they included a critical statement that said, ?No free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved . . . but by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.? Our founders well understood that our liberty could not be preserved without frequently referring back to first principles. But while they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defend those principles, we have often taken them for granted, as we have become complacent in thinking that government will take care of every problem. We have asked government to do more for us, and all the government asks for in return is a little bit more of our liberty. Over the decades, we kept asking. And because the courts and the politicians were all too happy to oblige, regardless of what the Constitution said, we no longer have a federal government of limited powers. We have an overreaching central government?a government that seeks to plan and control virtually every aspect of our lives and our economy, from health care, to energy, to automobile manufacturing, to banking and insurance. Thankfully, though, in the last several years, people have woken up and are pushing back. With this pushback, we are seeing the idea of federalism reemerge. People want to return to a government of limited, enumerated powers, and an arrangement in which states serve as a check when the federal government oversteps its constitutional bounds. In the current lawsuits brought by the states over health care and against the EPA, state governments are pushing back and reasserting federalism as the Founders intended them to do. Indeed, I am not aware of a time in history when this many states have sued the federal government to rein in its power: Today, more than half are parties to lawsuits against the new health care act and its individual health insurance mandate. Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

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THIS EVENING I PROPOSE to take on one of the greatest libels in the English language: the description of economics as ?the dismal science.? I hold a different view?that when it comes to seeing the potential in even the most desperate citizens of this earth, our economists, business leaders, and champions of a commercial republic are often far ahead of our progressives, artists, and humanitarians. And therein lies my tale. Hillsdale College is very much a part of this drama. For ?dismal science? was born as an epithet meant to dismiss those arguing that slaves deserved their freedom. In fact, the first recorded mention of the phrase ?dismal science? occurs in 1849?just five years after Hillsdale was founded. As the dates suggest, both Hillsdale?s founding and the caricature ?dismal science? were not unrelated to a great debate in England that in our nation would be resolved by civil war. Tonight I hope to persuade you that to call economics the ?dismal science? has it exactly backwards?that it is the economists and businessmen who hold the hopeful view of life, and that far from being fundamentally opposed, the admirers of Adam Smith have more in common with the followers of the Good Book than we might suppose. The Anti-Slavery Divide Let?s start with ?dismal science? itself. Even those who know nothing about economics have heard the term. A few might even know that it was Thomas Carlyle who came up with it. Very few know the salient point: Carlyle deployed the term in a magazine polemic entitled ?An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.? In that essay, Carlyle savaged the two groups who were leading the British fight against slavery: economists and evangelicals. The latter were sometimes abbreviated to ?Exeter Hall??a reference to the London building that served as the center of British evangelism and philanthropy. Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

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WE ARE OFTEN TOLD that we possess the most powerful military in the world and that we will face no serious threat for some time to come. We are comforted with three reassurances aimed at deflecting any serious discussion of national security: (1) that Islam is a religion of peace; (2) that we will never go to war with China because our economic interests are intertwined; and (3) that America won the Cold War and Russia is no longer our enemy. But these reassurances are myths, propagated on the right and left alike. We believe them at our peril, because serious threats are already upon us. Let me begin with Islam. We were assured that it was a religion of peace immediately following September 11. President Bush, a good man, believed or was persuaded that true Islam was not that different from Judaism or Christianity. He said in a speech in October 2001, just a month after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon: ?Islam is a vibrant faith. . . . We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not. Our enemy doesn?t follow the great traditions of Islam. They?ve hijacked a great religion.? But unfortunately, Mr. Bush was trying to understand Islam as we would like it to be rather than how countless devout Muslims understand it. Organizationally, Islam is built around a belief in God or Allah, but it is equally a political ideology organized around the Koran and the teachings of its founder Muhammad. Whereas Christianity teaches that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar?s and unto God what is God?s?allowing for a non-theocratic political tradition to develop in the West, culminating in the principles of civil and religious liberty in the American founding?Islam teaches that to disagree with or even reinterpret the Koran?s 6000 odd verses, organized into 114 chapters or Suras and dealing as fully with law and politics as with matters of faith, is punishable by death. Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

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THE PRESIDENCY is the most visible thread that runs through the tapestry of the American government. More often than not, for good or for ill, it sets the tone for the other branches and spurs the expectations of the people. Its powers are vast and consequential, its requirements impossible for mortals to fulfill without humility and insistent attention to its purpose as set forth in the Constitution of the United States. Isn?t it amazing, given the great and momentous nature of the office, that those who seek it seldom pause to consider what they are seeking? Rather, unconstrained by principle or reflection, there is a mad rush toward something that, once its powers are seized, the new president can wield as an instrument with which to transform the nation and the people according to his highest aspirations. But, other than in a crisis of the house divided, the presidency is neither fit nor intended to be such an instrument. When it is made that, the country sustains a wound, and cries out justly and indignantly. And what the nation says is the theme of this address. What it says?informed by its long history, impelled by the laws of nature and nature?s God?is that we as a people are not to be ruled and not to be commanded. It says that the president should never forget this; that he has not risen above us, but is merely one of us, chosen by ballot, dismissed after his term, tasked not to transform and work his will upon us, but to bear the weight of decision and to carry out faithfully the design laid down in the Constitution in accordance with the Declaration of Independence. Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

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Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. Within a month he signed a $787 billion ?stimulus package? with virtually no Republican support. It was necessary, we were told, to keep unemployment under eight percent. Overnight, the federal government had, as one of its highest priorities, weatherizing government buildings and housing projects. Streets and highways in no need of repair would be broken up and repaved. The Department of Transportation and other government agencies would spend millions on signs advertising the supposed benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I saw one of them on Roosevelt Island in Washington, D.C. It boasted that the federal park would be receiving a generous grant to facilitate the involvement of local youth in the removal of ?non-indigenous plants.? In other words, kids would be weeding. We need a sign to announce that? And this was going to save the economy? Then there was American Recovery and Reinvestment Act project number 1R01AA01658001A, a study entitled: ?Malt Liquor and Marijuana: Factors in their Concurrent Versus Separate Use.? I?m not making this up. This is a $400,000 project being directed by a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The following is from the official abstract: ?We appreciate the opportunity to refocus this application to achieve a single important aim related to our understanding of young adults? use of male [sic] liquor (ML), other alcoholic beverages, and marijuana (MJ), all of which confer high risks for experiencing negative consequences, including addiction. As we have noted, reviews of this grant application have noted numerous strength [sic], which are summarized below.? Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

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In President Obama, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in at least a generation. In 2008, he won the presidency with a majority of the popular vote?something a Democrat had not done since Jimmy Carter?s squeaker in 1976?and handily increased the Democrats? control of both houses of Congress. Measured against roughly two centuries worth of presidential victories by Democratic non-incumbents, his win as a percentage of the popular vote comes in third behind FDR?s in 1932 and Andrew Jackson?s in 1828. More importantly, Obama won election not as a status quo liberal, but as an ambitious reformer. Far from being content with incremental gains, he set his sights on major systemic change in health care, energy and environmental policy, taxation, financial regulation, education, and even immigration, all pursued as elements of a grand strategy to ?remake America.? In other words, he longs to be another FDR, building a New New Deal for the 21st century, dictating the politics of his age, and enshrining the Democrats as the new majority party for several decades to come. Suddenly, the era of big government being over is over; and tax-and-spend liberalism is back with a vengeance. We face a $1.4 trillion federal deficit this fiscal year alone and $10-12 trillion in total debt over the coming decade. Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

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AS ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL under President Ronald Reagan, I prepared a report for Attorney General Edwin Meese entitled ?The Constitution in the Year 2000: Choices Ahead.? This report sought to identify a range of areas in which significant constitutional controversy could be expected over the next 20 years. As critical as I believe those controversies were, they pale in significance before the controversies that will arise over the next several decades. The resolution of these emerging controversies will determine whether the Constitution of 2030 bears any resemblance to the Constitution of 1787?the Framers? Constitution that has guided this nation for most of its first two centuries and has rendered it the freest, most prosperous, and most creative nation in the history of the world. Proponents of a ?21st century constitution? or ?living constitution? aim to transform our nation?s supreme law beyond recognition?and with a minimum of public attention and debate. Indeed, if there is an overarching theme to what they wish to achieve, it is the diminishment of the democratic and representative processes of American government. It is the replacement of a system of republican government, in which the constitution is largely focused upon the architecture of government in order to minimize the likelihood of abuse of power, with a system of judicial government, in which substantive policy outcomes are increasingly determined by federal judges. Rather than merely defining broad rules of the game for the legislative and executive branches of government, the new constitution would compel specific outcomes. Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

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ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. For 18 years, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the South District of New York, and from 1993-95 he led the terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Following the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the Justice Department?s command post near Ground Zero. He has also served as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and an adjunct professor at Fordham University?s School of Law and New York Law School. Mr. McCarthy writes widely for newspapers and journals including National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and is the author of the book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

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SOMEONE once said that before there was the New Deal, there was the Wisconsin Deal. In my home state, the University of Wisconsin was an early hotbed of progressivism, whose goal was to reorder society along lines other than those of the Constitution. The best known Wisconsin progressive in American politics was Robert LaFollette. ?Fighting Bob,? as he was called, was a Republican?as was Theodore Roosevelt, another early progressive. Today we tend to associate progressivism mostly with Democrats, and trace it back to Woodrow Wilson. But it had its roots in both parties. The social and political programs of the progressives came in on two great waves: the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s. Today, President Obama often invokes progressivism and hopes to generate its third great wave of public policy. In thinking about what this would mean, we need look no farther than the health care reform program he is promoting along with the leadership in Congress. Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

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I have been asked to talk today about education and economic development. The standard thing to say on this topic is that the former is vital to the latter. We live in the modern world, so we all have to be highly informed and highly skilled and understand the power of modern science. It is a task of the very first importance to train a workforce that will be able to compete in the global marketplace. That is the standard thing to say, and we hear it said often by education bureaucrats from the federal level on down. And of course it is perfectly true, as far as it goes. But there is more to be said.
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I want to talk about the Western way of war and about the particular challenges that face the West today. But the first point I want to make is that war is a human enterprise that will always be with us. Unless we submit to genetic engineering, or unless video games have somehow reprogrammed our brains, or unless we are fundamentally changed by eating different nutrients?these are possibilities brought up by so-called peace and conflict resolution theorists?human nature will not change. And if human nature will not change?and I submit to you that human nature is a constant?then war will always be with us. Its methods or delivery systems?which can be traced through time from clubs to catapults and from flintlocks to nuclear weapons?will of course change. In this sense war is like water. You can pump water at 60 gallons per minute with a small gasoline engine or at 5000 gallons per minute with a gigantic turbine pump. But water is water?the same today as in 1880 or 500 B.C. Likewise war, because the essence of war is human nature.
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I think it is important, on the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, to take a look at our foreign policy and to judge whether or not we?re on a path to becoming safer. In doing so, we should not be intimidated by those who say that criticism of foreign policy?criticism that suggests we?re less safe as a consequence of certain policies?is somehow disloyal or hyper-partisan. It is the essence of political debate over foreign policy to judge whether the interests of the United States are being protected and advanced. If we believe they are not, it is our responsibility to speak out.
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Future Prospects for Economic Liberty by Walter Williams
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The Constitution and American Sovereignty by Jeremy Rabkin
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"Alll Honor to Jefferson" by Jean Yarbrough and "Hero, Standing" by Allen Guelzo
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