In a commencement speech in Ohio this past weekend, he said:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.

Read and watch his full comments here.

Now, some of his later points are quite correct: We shouldn’t, as Obama says, want to be “a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems”—nor should we attribute every single problem to government. As many problems as the government does cause, to absolve ourselves, our culture, our choices, and other factors both individual and institutional of all blame is itself irresponsible.

But the most controversial part of the President’s quote, the bit I’ve included above, is simply not true. As much as our government is supposed to be representative, to be of the people, by the people, for the people—all that jazz—I think we all know it’s not.

On financial questions alone, the contrast between the DC area in general and congress in particular is glaring. And let’s not even get into the way our government takes a strictly personal-convenience-based approach to the rule of law these days, feeling inclined toward strict “justice” when the question is whether a minority who got caught with pot should go to jail; but if it’s a matter of high-level officials approving of torture or spying on Americans without a warrant or drone strikes on children, there’s not a conviction to be found. Glenn Greenwald puts it well:

American history is suffused with violations of equality before the law. The country was steeped in such violations at its founding. But even when this principle was being violated, its supremacy was also being affirmed: resoundingly and unanimously in the case of the founders. That the rule of law—not the rule of men—would reign supreme was one of the few real points of agreement among all the founders. Arguably it was the primary one.…

[But if]—in the judgment of political leaders—it’s sufficiently disruptive, divisive, or distracting to hold powerful political officials accountable under the law on equal terms with ordinary Americans, then they should be exempt and the rule of law suspended, all in the name of political harmony, of “moving on.” But of course, it will always be divisive and distracting, by definition, to prosecute the most powerful political leaders, so [we have] created a template for elite immunity.

In light of the death of the rule of law and a multitude of other issues, we can only maintain today that our government is representative and working in our best interest if our heads are stuck firmly in the sand. Whether our government has always been “nothing more than some separate, sinister entity” is up for debate, but there’s no denying that this is an accurate description now. And while it’s not the “root of all our problems,” it’s certainly the root of many.

Now, the interesting thing is that Obama is not alone in his desire to persuade us that he and his compatriots are trustworthy. When the poll about millennials’ distrust of government came out, Trey Grayson of Harvard’s Institute of Politics said “he was particularly alarmed by the long-term implications of the poll’s results, explaining that the support of the millennials is key to the future stability of modern American institutions like the media, local and federal governments, and Wall Street.” He added that “We’ve got to give millennials a reason to trust these institutions.”

If Grayson’s name sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because he was the candidate widely backed by the GOP establishment in his race against Rand Paul for Senate in 2010. He’s a Republican, and he has the exact same perspective on the issue of whether or not we should trust the government as Barack Obama. Talk about giving the lie to your own argument…

A final point: Mistrust of government is not a bad thing. In fact, I’d suggest that even if you want far, far more government than I do, you should still want a large subset of the population who take everything the government says with a mountain of salt. Skepticism about what the government says and does is absolutely vital for keeping government honest. I’m happy to see this spirit on the rise among my generation; it’s been sorely lacking for years.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to Abigail Adams, “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.” I don’t like the armed rebellion he may have had in mind, but the principle holds: Not every distrust of government will be accurate. There will always be crazy conspiracy theories and people who see bugbears around every corner.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, because it’s a really important baby. In fact, it’s a quintessentially American baby; and to the extent that we have a national identity, however faint, this is it: There’s a real sense in which we don’t trust the government, and we don’t want to, and we never will. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Our modern kings take Ozymandias’ lead, but they tend to be less interested in statues and more interested in libraries — specifically, Presidential Libraries.

Above, the five living U.S. Presidents stand in front of the newly-dedicated George W. Bush Presidential Library while literally being heralded by a row of trumpeters. Ozymandias would be proud.

In the wake of the recent opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, Reason has a good piece from Gene Healy calling for an end to tax-dollar funding of Presidential libraries. “Let America’s former presidents burnish their legacies on their own dimes,” cheekily declares the tagline.

I completely agree. Not only are these fluff projects expensive:

At 226,560 square feet and a cost of $250 million, the Bush Presidential Center is the biggest and most expensive yet of the 13 presidential libraries that one scholar has derisively called “America’s Pyramids.” [...]

Though the libraries’ construction is privately funded, they’re managed by the National Archives and Records Administration, using federal tax dollars. Last year, it cost the American taxpayer some $75 million to keep them open.

…but they also (in this case, at least) seek to justify the unjustifiable, serving as a new wing of the self-glorification campaign in which ex-Presidents apparently love to engage:

One of the key exhibits at the Bush megalith is Decision Points Theater, a virtual Situation Room wherein visitors can “consult” video advisers and make their own calls on some of the “Decider’s” key decisions, like war with Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and bailing out the banks. [...]

In Decision Points Theater, if you decide not to go to war with Iraq, “43″ himself comes onscreen to tell you flatly that you’re wrong: ”Saddam posed too big a risk to ignore. … The world was made safer by his removal.”

Wow. Should we count the theater among the waning minority of the American public who agrees with Bush on this one? (Perhaps Mitt Romney is really the one to ask if theaters are people.)

All sarcasm aside, let’s be honest: These libraries are vanity projects, nothing more — fodder for field trips and president-worship incarnate. Erected to memorialize the greatness of Presidents not yet dead, they’re Ozymandias’ statue modernized: ”My name is George W. Bush, Decider of Deciders: Look on my works, ye Tourists, and accept that I’m right!”

Let’s be honest again: These guys are not poor. Of the living ex-Presidents, Clinton clocks in as the wealthiest with an estimated net worth of $38 million, and even Carter, the “poorest,” is not exactly struggling at $7 million.

If former Presidents want to play Ozymandias, let them also play financier. They’re better situated to it than are we. Healy concludes, “As it happens, our recent presidents have mainly left us a patrimony of mounting debt, intrusive government, and permanent war. If you seek their monument, look around you.”

Perhaps our Presidents have surpassed the ancient king in one regard: They’ve skipped straight to the decay.

Our government conducts an extensive droning campaign across the Middle East and North Africa. Targets are selected personally by the President using a secret “Kill List” (I know this sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, but it’s not — the story was originally broken by the New York Times.)

Fewer than 2% of those who die by our drone strikes are high level terror suspects. As for the other 98%, it’s difficult to determine how many are civilians and how many are low level terror operatives. The reason is that the Obama Administration classifies EVERY male from 18 to 60 who is killed as a terrorist, regardless of whether there is any evidence of guilt at all. This “guilty until proven innocent” mindset allows them to kill with impunity and claim that they are conducting targeted killings on a terrorist population, when that is simply not the case. Many of these men are simply poor farmers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some estimates put the civilian to terrorist killed ratio as high as 50 to 1.

But it gets worse. Even putting aside the dubious classification of many of the male victims, our drone strikes also kill a high percentage of women and children. We’ve even deliberately targeted wedding celebrations. And the most horrifying part: There’s a technique called “double-tap droning,” which is where we send a bomb on a target, wait a few minutes, and then circle back around to kill the first responders as they rush to help our victims. It’s a truly diabolical tactic.

In short, the bombing this Senate testimony is talking about is not an isolated incident, and it was not a mistake. Our drone warfare is a shameful, inhumane program which creates more enemies than it kills.

Above is a menu from the Metropolitan Club, a fancy private club in DC, from 1901. I was invited to an event there this week, and stumbled across this menu while researching the venue. At first I was shocked at how high the prices were — even by modern standards, $20 is ridiculous for a celery appetizer.

Then I realized: These prices are in cents, and the most expensive things on this fine dining menu cost all of $1.

60¢ for lobster salad. 20¢ for spaghetti. 40¢ for brandy peaches.

This is inflation writ in asparagus and meringues. 

The extreme differences between the prices on this menu and the prices we’d pay today (between 10 and 40 times the 1901 prices — e.g. $8 for a dessert rather than 25¢), is due to a century-long trend of the Dollar’s decline into near-worthlessness.

As you can see, the value of our currency has steadily dropped over the course of the last hundred years. (It was also on the decline before then, but not so steeply.)

If you’d like to play with the numbers on a year-by-year basis, try this inflation calculator.  As the results of my calculation put it, “What cost $1 in 1900 would cost $25.85 in 2010.  Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2010 and 1900, they would cost you $1 and $0.04 respectively.” Those results match well with our menu above (erring on the conservative side, perhaps), where entrées that today would run at least $30 depending on the restaurant location are listed for just $1.

That’s a lot of inflation, especially considering the lowering of prices which has been produced by technological advances, economies of scale, etc. So why is everything so much more expensive? Well, the rise in prices we see is a symptom of inflation rather than inflation itself. The underlying problem of the growth of our money supply, as our central bank, the Federal Reserve, creates more and more Dollars with nothing to back them.

This process raises the prices at expensive restaurants, to be sure, but it has a far graver result for those with low or fixed incomes. Corporations with close ties to the government often receive new money as soon as it is created in the form of bailouts, subsidies, or contracts, which allows them to spend it before the decline in the Dollar’s value it produces really takes effect. As Ron Paul has put it:

As government and central banks continue the cycle of spending and inflating, the purchasing power of their currencies is constantly being degraded. These currencies are what the people are working for and saving. This inflation guts the savings and earnings of the people who have very limited options for protecting themselves against these ravages….Fiat currencies trade the people’s freedom and security for the government’s freedom to squander the wealth of the nation on wasteful pet programs, wars, and corruption.

What is CISPA? It’s a bill which, if it becomes law, will let ”US law enforcement and intelligence service raid all of your data, all the time, without letting you know, regardless of your service provider’s privacy policy, in the name of preventing ‘cyberattacks,’ whatever they are.”

What does it mean for you? The privacy agreements you signed (and totally read) when making your many, many online accounts will become meaningless. Rep. Justin Amash’s office commented: “When Americans sign up for service with their phone company or their Internet provider they should be entitled to the privacy protections that the companies promise them. Giving companies legal cover to break their contracts with consumers is bad policy and a disservice to the American people.”

Isn’t President Obama against it? Well, he says he is, but we have to take that with a grain of salt. Remember, he once threatened to veto the NDAA and then went right ahead and signed it on a slow news day. It’s also worth noting that the Obama administration isn’t saying, “No, don’t give us massive amounts of private information about U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime which they thought wouldn’t be shared;” it’s saying, “Filter out their movie preferences first”:

Both government and private companies need cyber threat information….The Administration, however, remains concerned that the bill does not require private entities to take reasonable steps to remove irrelevant personal information when sending cybersecurity data to the government or other private sector entities.

What do CISPA supporters say about its opponents? Mean things. Namely that we’re all ”14-year olds” in our “basements.”  Right, because supporting privacy and internet freedom is childish.

So, what can you do to oppose this bill? The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that CISPA “may be voted on as early as [today]. This means there’s little time left to speak out.” Here’s how to contact your representative to tell him or her to vote NO:

• Call your Representative
• Tweet at your Representative
• Email your Representative

A. Here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s the job of the Republican Party to defend the church. And I’m not super interested in somehow fighting the “mass media” (an increasingly difficulty to define term in the internet age) because it says stuff we don’t like about the church.

Let’s start with the first point: Church and politics in many ways should not mix. Should our politics be informed by and congruent with our trust in Christ? Unquestionably.

But the church is not a political movement (remember, his “kingdom is not of this world”), and the very last thing I want to see happen is for the church to be wrapped up in or confused with or championed by any political party. It’s damaging to both sides, but especially to the mission and reputation of the church.

Greg Boyd says it well:

Kingdom people are called to pledge their allegiance to God alone, not to any nation, government, political party or ideology. Because Kingdom people are under the rule of God alone, they are not under any other rule. Kingdom people are thus called to be “anarchists” (meaning without [“an”] human authority [“archy”]). Not only this, but the main task of Kingdom people is to keep the Kingdom “holy” — meaning “set apart,” “separate” and “consecrated.” We are to take great care to live lives that are set apart from the ideals, values and methods of the world’s politics.

Now, on to the question of the mass media and stopping attacks on the church. My best suggestion: Let’s be more Christ-like.

Until the kingdom Jesus started with his death and resurrection is fully realized, there will always be people, both in and out of the media, who disagree with and even actively dislike Christianity. The Great Commission is designed to change this, of course, but realistically in our lifetimes this segment of the population is not going away.

What can we change? Our own behavior. As Christians, we’re supposed to be identifiable by our love, but here in America, frankly, we’re not. In fact, just the opposite is true:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)

This question reminds me a lot of the discussion over how to get more women to be libertarians. Many people take the position that there’s something wrong with women; I suggest that we libertarians instead work on improving our own pitch (and manners).

So how can the church go about changing our own behavior? Most simply, we should above all prioritize loving God and loving people. Practically, I think this looks like the church doing a lot less politics and a lot less being afraid of people who aren’t or don’t like us—and a lot more focusing on how to serve any and everyone.

And while this might have the pleasant side effect of making more people in the media like us, more important, it’s the main thing we’re supposed to be doing as Christians:

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.[…] God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. 

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. (I John 4:8, 16b-18)

I too think the church is invaluable; that’s exactly why I don’t want to see her battling off the media with the support of the GOP. We’re called to wash feet, not wage political war.

And if it doesn’t work? Well, people said worse things about Jesus.

Jonathan Magbie was ”a 27-year-old quadriplegic sentenced to ten days in jail for his first offense — possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor.” Magbie used marijuana to lessen the pain of his condition, from which he’d suffered since being hit by a drunk driver at the age of four. He was convicted for that use, and died as a result:

Because the Washington D.C. jail was incompetent to meet his special medical needs, including his dependence on a ventilator, that was a death sentence — Magbie was dead within four days.

When he was taken to court, the prosecution maintained that they had no interest in sending Magbie to jail because of his quadriplegia and the likelihood that his death would result from incarceration.  The presiding judge, one Judy Retchin, had other ideas.

Retchin understood the implications when she decided to incarcerate someone who used a wheelchair and needed a ventilator to breathe while sleeping. [...]

Malek Malekghasemi, associate medical director at the city’s Correctional Treatment Facility when Magbie entered the D.C. jail, called Retchin’s office and asked that she order that Magbie be sent to a hospital because the jail’s medical facilities could not meet his needs.

“Minutes later [Retchin's clerk] called me and said [the] judge will not issue such an order,” Malekghasemi said.

After Magbie’s death, the ACLU represented his family as they sued the city of Washington. The family received a large settlement, but Judge Retchin maintained to investigators that she had no idea Magbie needed a ventilator to live, despite the fact that court records show she very obviously knew exactly that.

Judge Retchin was cleared of wrongdoing and retains her judgeship — in fact, she was promoted to senior judge in 2010, two years after essentially sentencing a paralyzed man to death for smoking a joint.

Of course, there is one sense in which this tragedy should come as no surprise: Magbie was black, and in DC (as in many places in America) that means he was far more likely than average to get in trouble with the police for his drug use:

More per capita marijuana arrests are made in the District than in any other jurisdiction in the country, [but] even with a high arrest rate, some people in D.C. can probably safely get high without worrying that the cops are coming. Those people are white people. In 2007, 91 percent of those arrested for marijuana were black. In a city whose population demographics are steadily evening out, that’s odd. In fact, adjusting for population, African Americans are eight times as likely to be arrested for weed as white smokers are.

Since Magbie’s death, Washington has legalized medical marijuana, meaning that were he alive today his use of pot to alleviate pain would be completely legal, as it should be. What Judge Retchin did, however, should never be legal — and it’s beyond indecent that she is still on the bench.

A. Oooh, that’s tough.

Since you didn’t specify, I’ll assume you mean that anyone, living or dead, is fair game. Also, I’m going  to treat the “libertarian” category a little loosely, and I’ll probably be dissatisfied with this list as soon as I publish it, but here goes (in chronological order):

1. John Locke. While not a libertarian per se, the influence of the father of classical liberalism, particularly here in America, is huge.
2. Adam Smith. Also a classical liberal, Smith’s “invisible hand” metaphor and other ideas in his The Wealth of Nations have been incredibly influential. Even Murray Rothbard, who was quite critical of Smith’s most famous work, couldn’t deny its “colossal impact.”
3. Frédéric Bastiat. Author of The Law and the parable explaining the broken window fallacy. Enough said.
4. Ludwig von Mises. And with Mises, of course, comes Murray Rothbard. While these Austrian Economists are not famous among the general public, their influence has still been significant. Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute, is something of a modern successor. (I know, it’s kind of cheating to list them all at once.)
5. Henry Hazlitt. Hazlitt was a journalist and able popular apologist for libertarianism in the 20th century. While Hazlitt is now best remembered for Economics in One Lesson, he was widely known in his writing heyday as a prominent libertarian voice. New York Times bestselling author Tom Woods is something of a modern Hazlitt, albeit without the regular gig at Newsweek or its equivalent.
6. Freidrich Hayek. I’m not a huge Hayek fan — consistent he most certainly was not (come on, Pinochet? Really? Not to mention the support for redistribution) — but the man won the Nobel Prize and reached many with The Road to Serfdom, which continues to be a bestseller 70 years after publication.
7. Isabel Paterson. Along with Rand and Lane (below), Isabel Paterson is one of the three “founding mothers” of modern American libertarianism.
8. Ayn Rand. As I’ve recently mentioned, Ayn Rand is not my cup of tea, but her influence can’t be denied. Actually, she’d be quite angry to be listed as an influential libertarian, which amuses me.
9. Rose Wilder Lane. See above.
10. Ron Paul. Duh.
11. Rand Paul? Much too soon to tell. We’ll see.

I could easily go on, of course: Albert Jay Nock, Jacob Hornberger, Lysander Spooner, Glenn Greenwald, Zora Neale Hurston…there are so many others who, in one way or another — and whether they would call themselves “libertarian” or not — have done much to advance the message of liberty.

For most of those alive today, of course, it’s really too soon to tell. That’s why, at risk of verging into the same kind of foolishness that led Time to name “You” the Person of the Year a few years back, I’d add our generation to the list. There’s a real sense in which our generation is being “raised libertarian,” and I suspect and hope that this list will be much more difficult to make (and much more diverse) 30 years from now.

A. [I've left out the asker's name because he seemed to indicate a desire to remain anonymous. The query refers to this post, in which I suggested that police convicted of abuse should be required to pay their own settlements, rather than shoving the cost off onto taxpayers.]

To answer your question as bluntly as possible: Yes. Yes, I do think it’s appropriate in every case.

The police are not a special class of citizens. They are not absolved of responsibility for their crimes because they wear a badge. They are not above the law. In fact, if anything, as enforcers of the law, they should be subject to greater scrutiny. If the rest of us, once convicted of trespassing on private property, beating a person until her leg is broken, and then handcuffing her to her bed while she recovers (as the officer is accused of doing in the original case which sparked this discussion), would be required to suffer the legal consequences, then police should too.

As for “frivolous multi-million dollar lawsuits,” one of the best ways to protect oneself from them is to not beat people up in their homes when you have no right to be there. I don’t do it, and wouldn’t you know? — I’ve never been sued!

But all sarcasm aside, police misconduct is a widespread and serious problem. 84% of police officers report that they’ve seen colleagues use excessive force on civilians, and 61% “do not always report serious criminal violations that involve the abuse of authority by fellow officers.” Yet even with that mass under-reporting from police themselves, 6.6% of cops are accused of misconduct every year! Brutality and sexual harassment are the two most common complaints.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Only one out of every three accused cops are convicted, while the conviction rate for civilians is literally double that. Aside from benefiting from the same protections against false charges we all enjoy, police are already quite safe from frivolous lawsuits — safer than you or I will ever be. In some places, like Chicago, the numbers are even more skewed: There were 10,000 abuse complaints filed against the Chicago police between 2002 and 2004, and just 19 of them “resulted in meaningful disciplinary action.”

Finally, would requiring police officers to pay their own settlements really make them too scared to do their jobs? If so, we have a much bigger problem than I’d thought. You see, (comparatively) new “legal” encroachments on civil liberties like the PATRIOT Act aside, we have a pretty clear system of law and Supreme Court decisions which explains what cops can and can’t do. I struggle to imagine situations in which “you can’t beat single mothers while they’re mopping their hallway” is difficult to understand.

Or, “you can’t shoot a puppy just because it’s off a leash.”

Or, “you can’t strip-search a woman by the side of the road in front of her children, removing her tampon, because she went through a stop sign.”

Or, “you can’t lock an old lady in her basement while denying her request to help the grandson you just shot.”

Or, “you can’t perform roadside cavity searches on two women using the same glove during a traffic stop.”

Or, “you can’t shoot a cuffed, unarmed man in the back and kill him.”

Or — well, there are a lot of other examples I could give, but I think the point is made: It’s not like these are confusing or rare situations. Police misconduct is a widespread, oft-ignored problem which hits poor and minority communities especially hard.

So, again, yes, requiring taxpayers rather than the guilty officers to cover settlements — to the tune of $350 million per year — is simply ridiculous. It significantly lowers the cost to police of engaging in abusive behavior, and that’s not a cost I want to see lowered.