Only the federal government has the power to spend beyond its current revenue. It shouldn't do that when the economy is at full employment. But it's an essential step for an economy mired in recession.

No society has ever succeeded without a decent government.

As economists have long noted, the puzzle is not that so few people vote, it's that so many do. After all, no individual's vote has ever tipped the balance in a presidential election.

John Stuart Mill believed that the only acceptable reason for government to limit a person's liberty was to prevent him from causing unacceptable harm to others. Mill was not a libertarian, but many libertarians are quick to cite this principle when arguing against a regulation that they oppose. And I believe most thoughtful libertarians are prepared to embrace something fairly close to Mill's harm principle. But accepting that principle implies accepting many of the institutions of the modern welfare state that libertarians have vigorously opposed in the past, such as safety regulation.

We could curtail private spending by several trillion dollars a year without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. That would be more than enough to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and eliminate government indebtedness once and for all.

Pass down values every day through your actions, your words and your time with your kids.

The primary source of waste in government is that legislators are often under heavy pressure to vote for projects that will benefit their campaign contributors, even when those projects fail a simple cost-benefit test. But with the Supreme Court showing little interest in permitting tighter rules on campaign contributions in recent years, there is little reason to be optimistic that we'll start curbing this kind of waste any time soon.