“A government of laws, and not of men.” -John Adams

This statement rang out loud and clear to me when I saw the Extent of Federal Regulation made concrete, here.

What John Adam’s statement makes clear is the essential fact in a proper government that the law must be knowable and objective not subject to arbitrary whims of arbitrary men.

This does not mean 25 feet thick of books of regulations, and 6 feet of laws. When both are being added to at a rate of thousands of new laws and regulations per year, you have a situation where it is not possible to know in a single lifetime what is permissible action in a free society.

I do not advocate anarchy, rather objective law. It is impossible to have objective law when every action could require months or years of research to determine if it is punishable by the state. This of course is only the Federal regulations. Every state and town has their own collections of law books.

The solution, stop and repeal. The obvious starting point for repeal is any and all regulations that handcuff industry. And stop all of the regulation mills. There are many government agencies that issue Rules. Congress has delegated it’s law making responsibility to faceless, nameless, and unaccountable bureaucrats.

Dr. Leonard Peikoff, friend and intellectual heir to Ayn Rand, publishes a podcast approximately every other week. Despite the fact that he generally refuses to talk publicly about narrow political questions, he took some time in his October 20 podcast to discuss the current batch of candidates. He managed in a few sentences to say the obvious about each of the candidates in a way that would be funny if one of these gangs wouldn’t be the head of the Executive branch of the United States of America on January 20th.

I think McCain comes across as a tired moron. Obama as a lying phony. Biden as an enjoyably hilarious windbag. And Sarah Palin as an opportunist struggling to learn how to become a moron a phony and a windbag.

He gave some additional brief commentary as to why none of the Presidential candidates is fit to take office. If you think there is still some reason to choose one over the other but aren’t sure which you may want to listen, it could give starting points for further investigation.

I decided some time ago that I will not vote for any presidential candidate. It was with that decision in mind that Dr. Peikoff’s statement takes on a tragic humor and does cause me a brief chuckle.

The MSM had plenty to say about a 600 point drop in the Dow two Fridays ago when the house rejected the initial bailout plan. The blamed congress for not violating individual property rights and granting a large scale bailout of wall street to try and prop up a failing economy. Lucky for us they were able to paint the picture as simplistic that the federal government had an button under glass in the Capitol building which said in case of economic emergency break glass. So the congress got to work, they broke the glass. Now as I write the market is down significantly and is bouncing, but I suspect this is just a harbinger of greater plummets. The Fed of course will print more money and lower interest rates, but this will serve to drive inflation even faster.

The problem is not the wrong intervention or even not intervening quickly enough, the problem is government intervention in the economy at all. Government is the agency of force. Economic prosperity requires freedom, freedom to act on ones own judgment for ones own interest. The only role for the government in the economy is rooting out and prosecuting fraud and other uses of force. It is not a coincidence that the nation that was founded on individual rights and freedom is the most prosperous ever. It is government intervention that caused this problem and that will continue it. If the Congress wanted to act quickly they should have been discussing how to repeal laws which are applying friction to business, not make the biggest power grab for the central economic planners since the Great Depression.

The politicians have been blaming the “greedy” capitalists. But those capitalists that are so greedy, are the ones that create wealth and jobs.

The long term outlook of government intervention in the economy is clear and clearly terrible.

It is clear from the results and the form letters I receive from my Congressmen, for spending time writing well reasoned arguments, is not worth the effort. I have therefore decided to change my tactics. While I know at best my letters will be tallied into No support or Yes support piles by bored staffers, and at worst ignored completely, I can only hope to amuse myself through the time spent writing such letters.

As such I couldn’t stop myself when I received a form letter from Senator Robert Casey in response to my many pleas to vote ‘No’ on this bailout plan in which he rationalized his position. I decided the only tactic that would prevent me from becoming homicidal was to introduce sarcasm. As such my letter follows:

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