Connecting with other people who care about liberty in America is a great way to spend July 4. To find a Tea Party event near you, check out the extensive schedule at The Tea Party and Revolution Web site.

Courtesy of Michael Quinn Sullivan of Empower Texans, here is a reminder that the work of liberty awaits us on July 5 and thereafter:

Each Independence Day I think of my ancestor Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Two centuries and numerous generations later, I take much inspiration from what he and his colleagues committed to in the summer of 1776.

Just imagine how different the world would be had they not approached independence with a passionate commitment to liberty!

But what if on Friday, July 5, 1776, the men who approved the Declaration of Independence merely headed home believing their work done? Sure, they declared the equality of men, extolling the inalienable rights to life and liberty. It must have felt good to vent frustrations about the king. What if each man decided the talk of freedom shouldn’t inconvenience anyone too much?

Alas, there would have been no “new nation, conceived in liberty.” Rather than Old Glory, our public spaces would today be festooned with the Union Jack – or worse. The world would be a darker place.

As a legal document only the president of the Congress – John Hancock – probably had to sign the Declaration, but the others did as well. Benjamin Franklin reportedly said to Hancock, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

They pledged their “lives… fortunes… and sacred honor” to the cause of independence and liberty. No limits to that pledge; for them, everything was on the line. The cause of liberty was wrapped up in every facet of their lives.

Indeed, they saw the fight for political liberty as inextricably linked to providing for their families, serving in their churches, and ensuring the long-term prosperity of their neighbors.

They didn’t know if they would be hung the next week, bankrupted the next month, expelled from social circles the next year, or lost forever in the ash heap of history. But they believed in the righteousness of the cause. They knew liberty, as messy and inconvenient as it might sometimes be, was worth it for themselves and their posterity.

Let us not forget that it wasn’t just those 56 signers who birthed our nation 233 years ago. Tens of thousands fought against the crown and for liberty, giving life to our democratic republic.

Over the course of the revolutionary war, the fields of America were watered by the blood of men young and old who believed dying for the chance of liberty was better than living under the yoke of tyranny. Even as so many of their names are lost to history, their legacy is this brilliant city upon a hill, securing the blessings of liberty.

That’s what they were willing to do the day after the Fourth of July in 1776.

In this year, once the parades conclude, BBQs end, and fireworks explode, what will we do for the cause of liberty on the Fifth of July? That’s the day that counts, and each day after. While it’s good to celebrate our national independence, we must daily take action to preserve our liberty.

The cause of liberty – in our cities, counties, schools, state and nation – needs us more than ever. And it is still worth it.

President Obama told us he wanted to redistribute more income, and he is following through on that plan, says the Tax Foundation. In 2012, the first year that all of President Obama’s major taxing and spending initiatives would be in place (assuming Congress passes the programs), the top 1 percent of income earners will see an additional $64,000 per family redistributed to other families. For these families, the total income redistribution would rise from $368,000 to $432,000. That is the net redistribution, which the Tax Foundation calculates by considering the distribution of tax burdens and the distribution of spending. In other words, the amount of tax paid by these families would exceed the cost of the government services they receive by $432,000 in 2012. Earners in the 99th to 95th percentiles would also see a modest increase in redistribution away from them. The Tax Foundation calculates that the total redistribution for earners in the top 5 percent would be about 16 percent of their income in 2012. That figure, again, is not the tax burden for those families, but rather the amount of taxes that exceeds the cost of the government services they use. All other earners see either no change in redistribution or an increase in income redistributed to them.

A program of promising benefits to 60 percent of the people at the expense of only 5 percent of the people has obvious advantages in political marketability. But why stop there? The next candidate for President could up the ante by promising even greater benefits to 51 percent of the people at the expense of the top 25 percent of income earners. Aside from the economic costs of class war policies, voters eventually need to start considering the possibility that they too will end up in the government’s crosshairs. Remember, when the income tax was first established in the United States in 1913, the top rate was only 7 percent and it applied to only the top one-half of 1 percent of income earners.

According to Sergei Kovalev, World War II started “because of Poland’s refusal to meet Germany’s requests.” Kovalev writes: “The German demands were very modest. You could hardly call them unfounded.” Hitler, in Kovalev’s view, didn’t really want Lebensraum, but merely transport links across the Polish corridor to East Prussia and to the free city of Gdansk.

The views of a crank? Actually Kovalev is a colonel and a researcher in the Russian Ministry of Defense. Earlier this month, the ministry posted Kovalev’s lengthy essay laying out his views in a section of its Web site with the heading: “History: Lies and Falsifications.” The heading, it seems, was intended to identify Western historians and the press as the liars, not Kovalev himself. The Russian Ministry of Defense has since removed the paper from its Web site and disavowed it. Even so, the posting raises questions about how far the Russian government will go in attempting to control the writing of Russian history. Last month, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev created a commission to identify foreign “revisionists” who disparage the country’s prestige.

“Revisionism” is a relative term, of course. Kovalev’s article also argues that the British bear responsibility for the war since they gave Poland assurances of assistance in the event of an attack. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? Just a variation of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement, says Kovalev. Russia was trying to buy time to prepare for the eventual German invasion. So according to Kovalev, the war was both avoidable by Poland and also an inevitability for which the Soviet Union needed to prepare by invading Poland.

Proposed legislation backed by Medvedev would make it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, for anyone—foreigner or Russian—to claim that the Soviet Union occupied Poland or the Baltic States. Meanwhile, as the Russian writer Ivan Sukhov points out, the German Administration for the Defense of the Constitution would likely see Kovalev’s article as a defense of Hitler and therefore a violation of German law.

Historian Alan Charles Kors sums up what’s going on here: “Orwell had it right: ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ The Kremlin controls the Russian present.” This is the Kremlin with whom President Obama will be confabbing on July 7.

There may be good reasons to reform health care, but is the fact that health care costs rise two to three times faster than inflation one of those reasons? Says economist George Newman:

That’s like comparing the price of hamburger 30 years ago with the price of filet mignon today and calling the difference inflation. Or the price of a 19-inch, black-and-white TV 30 years ago with the price of a 50-inch HDTV today. The improvements in medical care are even more dramatic, leading to longer life, less pain, fewer exploratory surgeries and miracle drugs. Of course the research, the equipment and the training that produce these improvements don’t come cheap.

Newman debunks more health care myths in his article, “Parsing the Health Reform Arguments,” in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries have paid too little attention to the science of global warming. EPA and others have tended to accept the findings reached by outside groups, particularly the IPCC and the CCSP, as being correct without a careful and critical examination of their conclusions and documentation.” So begins a report written not by an outside critic, but by two employees at the Environmental Protection Agency itself: Alan Carlin and John Davidson, researchers at EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics. Yes, there are environmental skeptics who work at the EPA, and we know it thanks to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Last week CEI obtained a series of e-mails showing that in mid-March Carlin’s bosses put a gag order on him and attempted to bury a report by Carlin and Davidson. The e-mails show that Carlin’s bosses were afraid of forwarding the report because it would undercut the case for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. At the time, EPA was finishing work on a finding that called for regulating greenhouse gases emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Now the 98-page report by Carlin and Davidson has also been revealed to the public, too. A good rule of thumb is if the government doesn’t want you to know something, it’s probably worth knowing. Before the Senate considers the costly global warming legislation just passed by the House (which would supplant any regulations under the Clean Air Act), senators should take the time to read what Carlin and Davidson wrote.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano runs to 93 pages. That’s about 93 pages more than it took the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss it last fall. The case raises the question of when race-conscious hiring practices are permitted under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In Monday’s decision, the Court overturned the Second Circuit by holding that the city of New Haven did in fact violate the Civil Rights Act when it threw out the results of promotion exams given to city firefighters. New Haven threw out the tests because not enough African-Americans scored well. The Court ruled against New Haven without even reaching the constitutional question of whether provisions in the Civil Rights Act that require race-conscious hiring (in order to avoid a disparate impact on minorities) violate the 14 Amendment’s equal-protection clause.

Still, the Court devoted 93 pages to deciding the case. Apparently, the Court thinks there are important issues raised by the practice of reverse discrimination (AKA discrimination). By contrast, the Second Circuit decision dismissing the case took the form of an unpublished summary order. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who heard the case as a member of the Second Circuit, may want to explain whether she really thinks the issues in this case were so unimportant that they merited no contemplation at all. If not, the Senate may want to ask. (See also, “Morning Bell: The Sotomayor Pattern,” by Robert Alt, June 30, 2009.)

Chances are you are at least dimly aware of the existence of Twitter, one of the many social networking platforms that can help you build a following and get the word out about events you are organizing. For those who want to become really effective users of Twitter, we recommend the Twitter 101 Guide (now revised and expanded) published by the David All Group. The Twitter 101 Guide covers the basics for those just getting started on Twitter, provides ideas on how to personalize your account, and showcases how some of the best Twitter users have made Twitter an integral part of their communications effort. Just visit the Twitter 101 Guide download page (www.davidallgroup.com/twitter-101-guide) to get a free copy.

Bruce Bartlett reports:

According to [CBO Director Douglas] Elmendorf, by the end of fiscal year 2009, which ends on Sept. 30, about a third of the least stimulative spending will have been spent vs. only 11% of the highly stimulative spending. Even at the end of fiscal year 2010, we will have spent only 47% of the highly stimulative spending. By the end of fiscal year 2011, more than a quarter of the stimulative spending will still remain unspent.

If stimulus spending proves to be unnecessary in 2011, will Congress cut spending to avoid inflation?

Things you might not know about the cap-and-trade plan to fight global warming:

In the drive to single-payer health care, liberals may end up hoisted with their own petard. At the very least, say David Rivkin and Lee Casey, anything like a single-payer system or any sort of government-imposed standards on medical practice will elicit significant constitutional challenges. Why? Because in a series of cases that includes Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has established a constitutional right to privacy. Rivkin and Casey write:

 … when the overwhelming moral issues that surround the abortion question are stripped away, what is left is a medical procedure determined to be “necessary” by an expectant mother and her physician.

If the government cannot proscribe – or even “unduly burden,” to use another of the Supreme Court’s analytical frameworks – access to abortion, how can it proscribe access to other medical procedures, including transplants, corrective or restorative surgeries, chemotherapy treatments, or a myriad of other health services that individuals may need or desire?

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has uncovered a series of e-mails suggesting that in mid-March EPA managers buried a report raising doubts about the scientific basis for EPA’s decision to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. CEI submitted the material as part of a public comment to the EPA on Tuesday, just ahead of the deadline for submitting comments. CEI wants EPA to release the report to the public.

In one e-mail, dated March 12, 2009, Al Gartland, director of EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, instructed researcher Alan Carlin to refrain from discussing his research with anyone outside of the NCEE. Carlin then urged Gartland to reconsider his decision not to send his report to the Office of Air and Radiation, which directs EPA’s climate programs, and Gartland answered on March 17:

Alan, I decided not to forward your comments. The time for discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. … I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.

Gartland sent a follow-up e-mail seven minutes later:

With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.

Why were EPA researchers not allowed to share their findings with the people making decisions about significant environmental regulations? What was in Carlin’s report?

Some now say we can save the planet for only $175 per family. They’re citing the Congressional Budget Office’s recent estimates of the costs of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Actually, the $175 figure is just a one-year cost—the estimate for 2020. More fundamentally, as Karen Campbell & Co. from The Heritage Foundation explain, the CBO report is just a cash-flow analysis that assumes a large portion of the allowance revenues will be recycled back into the pockets of taxpayers via rebates. In other words, more government spending reduces the “cost” of the program, the CBO says.

Left out of the CBO estimate is that the plan will still force higher energy prices which will have real economic consequences. The CBO even acknowledges it isn’t counting these costs (see footnote 3 on page 4). According to Heritage estimates, for the period 2012-2035, the cap-and-trade part of Waxman-Markey will reduce gross domestic product by $393 billion per year. In 2035, the annual cost per family reaches $6,790 (in 2009 dollars).

When comparing different estimates of costs, keep in mind that the cost of a policy to taxpayers is not the same thing as the society-wide cost of a policy. A critical consideration is how a policy impacts the allocation of resources and whether the new allocation gives us a higher or a lower standard of living. Recycling government revenues back to taxpayers won’t change the reality that under cap-and-trade artificially higher energy prices will send false signals to consumers about the costs of their energy consumption. Consumers will respond by forgoing some amount of energy consumption. Even though they may shift their consumption to items that require relatively less energy to produce, consumers are not better off, since they would have preferred other products and services had relative prices not changed. These are the real costs that are often difficult to see.

(See “CBO Grossly Underestimates Cost of Cap and Trade,” by David Kreutzer, Karen Campbell, and Nicolas Loris, Heritage Foundation, June 24, 2009.)

By the way, if supporters of cap-and-trade really want to assure folks that the allowance revenue will end up back in the hands of taxpayers, then they should just adopt Martin Feldstein’s suggestion of giving the allowances directly to taxpayers and letting taxpayers sell them to the emitters.

What should we make of the idea of creating health insurance co-ops, now being pushed as an alternative to a government-designed public health insurance option? According to Cato’s Michael Tanner, the proposal is either meaningless or it is a deception that will bring about the same result as a public plan: a tilting of the playing field that destroys real competition. It would be meaningless because states already have the power to charter health insurance co-ops, which are simply insurance companies owned and operated by those who are insured. In fact, writes Tanner, co-ops already exist: “Health Partners, Inc. in Minneapolis has 660,000 members and provides health care, health insurance and HMO coverage. The Group Health Cooperative in Seattle provides health coverage for 10 percent of Washington State residents. PacAdvantage, a California co-op, covers 147,000 people.”

If such entities are already free to compete in the marketplace with other insurance companies, then what change is Congress proposing? Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), notes Tanner, has said he wants a single, national co-op with officers and directors appointed by the president and Congress. And Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has said of the co-op idea: “It’s got to be written in a way that accomplishes the objectives of a public option.”

In other words, for these senators co-ops are just another name for a government health insurance plan. As Tanner says: “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks likes a duck, it’s probably a duck.”

Jim Manzi at The Corner, Ben Lieberman at The Foundry, and Pat Michaels and Sallie James at Planet Gore, each have worthwhile reads today on the global warming legislation that now appears headed for a vote in the House on Friday.

According to Manzi’s analysis, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade plan “would impose costs at least ten times as large as its benefits, would not reduce the deficit, and doesn’t even really cap emissions.”

Lieberman notes Heritage Foundation estimates that the higher energy prices that would be forced by the bill amount to a tax increase of $3,000 per year per household for the period 2012-2035—“and even assuming a few hundred more pages are added tomorrow or the day after, this remains a massive energy tax.”

Meanwhile, Michaels and James report that the new bill increases the likelihood that the United States will impose carbon tariffs on countries that don’t have similarly restrictive emissions policies. “Economy-killing climate policies and a trade war — together at last!”

Any given firm or industry can always be rescued by a sufficiently large government intervention, whether in the form of subsidies, purchases of the firm’s or industry’s products by government agencies, or by other such means. The interaction that is ignored by those advocating such policies is that everything the government spends is taken from somebody else. The 10,000 jobs saved in the widget industry may be at the expense of 15,000 jobs lost elsewhere in the economy by the government’s taxing away the resources needed to keep those other people employed.

We need only imagine what would have happened if the government had decided to “save jobs” in the typewriter industry when personal computers had first appeared on the scene and began to take away customers from the typewriter manufacturers.

That’s from Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy (2004). We recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn where economic growth comes from and how government intervention often makes us all poorer. This book does a great job of debunking common but very damaging economic ideas.

A cap-and-trade plan for fighting global warming is a plan for automatic tax increases every year such a plan is in effect. Under the version outlined in the Waxman-Markey legislation, Congress could expect to see increasing federal revenues every year for 40 consecutive years without ever having to take a vote to increase taxes.

In a cap-and-trade system, businesses must buy permits for their emissions and the permits become gradually scarcer—and thus more expensive—as the target for emissions reduction is ratcheted up. The costs of those permits are passed on to consumers. It is, in effect, an energy tax designed to reduce energy consumption, and thus emissions. According to the Congressional Budget Office, reducing the level of CO2 to just 15 percent less than the total level of U.S. emissions in 2005 would require permit prices that would increase the cost of living of a typical household by $1,600 per year. For a typical family of four earning $50,000 per year and paying an annual income tax of $3,000, cap-and-trade amounts to a 50 percent tax increase.

And that’s just for starters: Under Waxman-Markey the target for emission reductions rises to 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. According to the Brookings Institute, by 2050 the government’s carbon revenues would be equivalent to $200 billion in today’s economy. What do the voters of 2050 think about such a tax burden?

For more problems with the Waxman-Markey bill, see “The Exploding Carbon Tax,” by Martin Feldstein, The Weekly Standard, June 13, 2009.

If you’re looking for intellectual ammunition to help bolster your arguments for less government spending and taxing, you should start by checking out the work of a think tank near you. Every state now has a think tank dedicated to promoting state policies based on limited-government, free-market ideas. Check the State Policy Network’s directory to identify your state-based think tank.

These think tanks produce great work, especially when it comes to identifying ideas for reducing wasteful, unnecessary spending at the state level. See, for example, “The Best Courses in Self-Help Are Found at Your Local State-Based Think Tank,” Insider Online, March 5, 2009.

State think tanks are also especially attentive to the problem of an overweening federal establishment. In some cases, your state’s free market think tank is likely to be the only major voice against reliance on federal bailouts to fix state budget troubles. A great discussion of this problem can be found in the Goldwater Institute report, “Arizona’s Struggle for Sovereignty: The Consequences of Federal Mandates,” by Benjamin Barr.  

Finally, many of the state-based think tanks are reaching out to the Tea Party movement, too. The Mackinac Center in Michigan, for instance, has produced a Tea Party Activist Toolbox that contains a lot of great ideas.

In a recent blog post, we reported that since 1970 Medicare’s per-patient spending has grown 34 percent more than that of privately purchased health care, suggesting that creating a public health insurance option is not a reform strategy that will succeed in arresting the growth of health care expenditures. That finding, from a report by Jeffrey Anderson for the Pacific Research Institute, is displayed nicely in a graph from Friday’s Investor’s Business Daily:

One of the really interesting things about Anderson’s report is what it reveals about private insurance, which other studies have shown to do a poorer job of controlling costs than Medicare. The cost advantage of private spending, says Anderson, comes entirely from the slower rate of growth of the non-insurance portion of private per-patient spending—out-of-pocket expenditures. That suggests rather strongly that the reforms that have the best chance of moderating the growth of health care expenditures are those that bring consumer consciousness (i.e., people spending their own money) back into the health care marketplace.

Further support for this notion can be found in a recent report of the American Academy of Actuaries that summarizes the findings of a number of studies on consumer-directed health plans (i.e., plans that combine high-deductible health insurance with a tax-free health savings account for out-of-pocket health care expenses). Those studies find that consumer-directed plans have yielded cost savings of between 12 percent and 20 percent compared to traditional health insurance.

Since the goal of health care reform should be to maximize the value we receive for every health care dollar we spend—not just to save money—it’s also worth mentioning this point: Consumer-directed plans achieve savings without sacrificing quality. All of the studies reviewed in the AAA report find that patients in consumer-directed plans receive at least as much necessary care and more preventive care than patients in traditional health insurance.

Are you concerned that health care reform will mean more control for bureaucrats and fewer choices for you and other patients? The group Patients United Now is organizing rallies around the country to express support for a health care system that answers to patients instead of Washington, D.C. Here’s a list of the rallies they currently have scheduled:

Alaska
• Anchorage: Thursday, June 25 at 5:30 p.m. at Park Strip on 9th and L Streets

Arkansas
• Mountain Home: Saturday, July 4 at 11:30 a.m. at Bombers Football Field
• Rogers: Saturday, July 4
• Fayetteville: Saturday, July 4 at the Washington County Fair Grounds

Indiana
• Indianapolis: Tuesday, June 30 at 12 p.m. at the Indiana Statehouse on Washington and Capitol

Montana
• Kalispell: Monday, June 29
• Billings: Thursday, July 2

South Dakota
• Sioux Falls: Tuesday, June 30 at 5 p.m. at Terrace Park Bandshell on Madison Street and Menlo Avenue

Utah
• Salt Lake City: Wednesday, June 24 at 5:30 p.m. at Veterans Memorial Park, 1985 West 780 South, West Jordan

Also, if you live in Maine you may want to check out one of the Maine Heritage Policy Center’s upcoming lunch seminars examining the pitfalls of giving government more control over health care.