The Founders were right all along, but the results are a lot funnier than they intended.

It's all very well to run around saying regulation is bad, get the government off our backs, etc. Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersections, no fish and no ducks. OK?

What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit.

Oh, hell, I can’t go on a spiritual journey—I'm constipated.

Most of us think of government as them. Yet government isn't Them: It's us.

Economist Frederick Thayer has studied the history of our balanced-budget crusades and has come up with some depressing statistics. We have had six major depressions in our history (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1929); all six of them followed sustained periods of reducing the national debt. We have had almost chronic deficits since the 1930s, and there has been no depression since then - the longest crash-free period in our history.

Of course, it has never paid much.