The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, as if we needed another demonstration, that little stands between the government and our liberty. Champions of individual freedom have been properly disturbed by how much power governments at all levels have seized since the pandemic hit in 2020. To make matters worse, officeholders and public-health officials object when the judicial branch occasionally overturns their power grabs because judges are said to be unqualified to rule on "medical" matters. So, if judges furnish constitutional and other legal grounds against power grabs, we're supposed...
James Madison
The Astronomical Price of America’s Undeclared Wars
According to a study by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, since 2001, America’s wars have cost $5.6 trillion. That equates to $23,000 per taxpayer. This is more than three times the Pentagon estimate – which still comes in at a staggeringly high $1.5 trillion. Study author, Neta Crawford said the Pentagon’s failure to account for much of the cost of waging war accounts for the discrepancy between official numbers and the study. “War costs are more than what we spend in any one year on what’s called the pointy end of the spear,” she told the Wall...
James Madison’s Instruction: Throw a Fit!
What should the average person do when the federal government oversteps its constitutional bounds? Throw a fit! That’s what James Madison recommended when he laid out a blueprint for dealing with unconstitutional federal acts in Federalist #46. He wrote that when the federal government enacts an “unwarrantable measure,” or even a “warrantable measure” that happens to be unpopular, “the means of opposition to it are powerful and at hand.” One of those means of opposition involves “the disquietude of the people.” In other words, when the federal government does things outside of its...