You have to have a sense of humor if you follow politics. Otherwise, the sheer fraudulence of it all will get you down.

Subsidies are a shell game, not a net addition to national wealth.

When Congress votes for all sorts of benefits, without voting for enough taxes to pay for them, they get the support of those who have been promised the benefits, without getting grief from the taxpayers. It's strictly win-win as far as the welfare-state politicians are concerned. But it is strictly lose-lose, big-time, for the country, as deficits skyrocket.

One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others, became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness toward others made the sins of capitalism pale.

If we spend our time with regrets over yesterday, and worries over what might happen tomorrow, we have no today in which to live.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.