As a Democratic senator campaigning for president, Barack Obama made one such attack when he promised to abandon the “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” Indeed, Obama’s rhetoric echoed the sentiment of voters who, a 2007 poll showed, widely opposed the Bush wiretap program by a margin of 61 to 35 percent.

As clear-cut as the polls and the rhetoric were, Obama reversed his position mid-campaign and voted for the 2008 overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that legalized much of the Bush wiretap program and granted retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that helped the Bush Administration spy on Americans.

When Obama assumed the Presidency, he continued to make use of the warrantless surveillance program and even violated the limits of the very law he voted for in 2008. Today, the “Obama’s administration now relies heavily on such surveillance in its fight against Al Qaeda,” The New York Times reported.

Importantly, not only did President Obama continue to use the Bush-era surveillance program that he denounced as a senator, his administration even employed the same legal arguments used by Bush’s Department of Justice to defend the program in court.

For example, in the case above, an Islamic charity alleged that the NSA illegally listened to phone conversations between the charity and its lawyers without obtaining a warrant. Rather than argue over the program’s legality, the Obama Administration copied a play from the Bush Administration and attempted to assert the state secrets privilege, arguing that discussing the case in court jeopardized national security.

These similarities in the security policies and legal strategies of the Bush and Obama administrations are illustrative of one important point: Government, no matter which party is in control, is rarely willing to relinquish powers it has accumulated whether those powers were attained legally or illegally.

Although the differences between Republicans and Democrats may appear stark in the light of health care reform, we should not be fooled into believing that either party is committed to restoring American liberty. For this reason, as I think about the 2010 elections, I find myself unable to feel too enthusiastic about the possibility of a Republican resurgence.

After all, the party that gave us warrantless surveillance in the first place demonstrates few signs that it understands the lessons of the Bush-era and even fewer that it is willing to apply them. It is still the party that would restrict abortion rights, stagnate LGBT rights and sacrifice liberty to purchase temporary security.

Sure, the Republicans were opposed to expanding government control over one-sixth of the American economy but there is little evidence that Republicans fully understand the moral argument against government expansion and still less evidence that they would be able to successfully appeal all or part of Obamacare anytime in the next decade.

For this reason, we must understand that the way to shrink the government and limit its ability to intrude into our daily lives is not simply to elect a candidate with a different letter after his or her name. We tried this with Obama and he’s clearly shown that he cannot be trusted to restore American civil liberties.

Instead, we must find new ways to limit the size of government that concurrently limit the power of political parties, the earnings potential of career politicians and the ability of said politicians to isolate themselves from the public. Possible solutions could be found in the methods adopted by individual states to slow the growth of government.

Texas, for instance, has a part-time legislature that meets for only 140 days every two years and then holds special sessions as situations merit it. Its costs are far lower than those of full-time state legislatures and, most importantly, its legislators are not career politicians but instead regular people who must work in their state like everyone else under the laws they pass.

Indeed, I believe that legislation produced by our federal government would look very different if Congress were comprised of citizen lawmakers rather than career politicians. I doubt that many citizen lawmakers would vote to give a government agency the power to spy on Americans without warrants or regulate one-sixth of the economy if they felt that the law might apply to them at some point.

Recognizing that Congress failed to protect individual freedoms, Americans must now turn to the states and the courts to defend our Constitutional liberties.

Appropriately, 13 states filed suit against the federal government last Tuesday asserting that, “the Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.”

Over the last week, other states continue to join the fray, either by filing independent suits or by joining the original lawsuit. As a Pennsylvanian, I am proud that Pennsylvania State Attorney General Tom Corbett was one of the original 13 plaintiffs. A candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary, Corbett said he is pursuing the suit as “a 10^th Amendment issue” and that he would be pursuing the suit whether he was running for governor or not.

Predictably, Corbett’s critics on the left (many of whom are possible opponents in the gubernatorial election) refused to accept this explanation. Notably, Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato said that the suit was “a taxpayer-funded political stunt” and Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel compared Corbett to Civil War era Senator John C. Calhoun, a legislator from South Carolina who argued that states could nullify federal laws.

Most egregiously, State Representative and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Dwight Evans (D-Philadelphia) said that he would cut funding from the Attorney General’s office in order to prevent Corbett from proceeding with the suit. Not to be left out, Democratic Governor Ed Rendell joined the Leftist ridicule of Corbett when he said that the suit would fail “because any lawyer worth their salt will tell the governors that there’s something called the federal supremacy clause.”

Regrettably, Rendell’s education appears to have failed him because – as any former district attorney “worth his salt” should understand – Corbett and the other 12 attorneys general            are filing suit alleging that the 10^th Amendment precludes the federal government from mandating that citizens purchase a product.

Whatever Rendell thinks, Corbett has a point. The 10^th Amendment reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Since nowhere in the Constitution did the Founders give the United States the power to require that citizens purchase anything, it is logical that such a power is reserved either to the states or – more likely – the people.

In this way, Corbett and his co-plaintiffs clearly have the Constitution on their side. It is, after all, a document dedicated to limited government and created by the Founders with the goal of protecting the people and the states from burdensome intrusions into their respective spheres.

The reason that so many legal scholars pronounced that the suit has little chance is that precedent demonstrates that the courts are unwilling to use the Constitution – and especially the 10^th Amendment — to limit federal powers. Instead, over the last 100 years, courts interpreted the Commerce Clause as a sort of blank check for federal power that justifies everything from wheat quotas to the War on Drugs.

Importantly, the Roberts Court is positioned to turn the page on this era of government expansion and redefine federal power through a more faithful reading of both the Constitution and the intent of the Founders.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott best represented such hopes when he said, “No public policy goal — no matter how important or well-intentioned — can be allowed to trample the protections and rights guaranteed by our Constitution.” No matter the arguments in favor of health care reform, no matter how many millions of Americans such legislation is poised to cover, we must not set aside our Constitution in order to materially enrich the lives of some citizens.

There is a slim chance that the Roberts Court will heed such arguments and it is sadly the best chance we have of breathing new life into our Constitution.  Corbett should be lauded for attempting to restore the balance of power between the people, the states and the federal government.

Importantly, this campus-centered morality is founded on an appearance of thinking for oneself but regularly involves the uncritical adoption of another person’s needs as the morality’s driving force. This is evident in the international humanitarian who organizes students to stop hunger in Africa; it’s evident in the new socialist who self-consciously sloughs off his middle class background to decry the excesses of capitalists and starts a group working to unionize service employees; most of all, it’s obvious in the student who worked tirelessly to elect Barack Obama in 2008 because he or she felt that health care was a right.

What all these archetypes of college life have in common is that they involve the college student’s acceptance of another person’s needs or values as more important than the individual student’s own. Ayn Rand called such people “second handers” – those who live through others — explaining that, “After centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand.”

Indeed, the dominant campus Left that so many politically active students identify with is a political movement whose morality is “second-hand,” whose ideology is defined by altruism and whose adherents, though claiming to think for themselves, just uncritically adopt this other-focused way of thinking.

Dr. Allan Gotthelf, a visiting professor in Pitt’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science and an expert on Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, explained the relevant part of Rand’s view of morality in two principles: First, “Each person has a right to pursue his own rational self-interest” and second, “We will benefit from [others] pursuing their own self-interest, just as they will from our pursuing ours.”

These pillars of Objectivism constitute the morality of that segment of the political Right that values individual responsibility, free markets and small government and it is this morality that is largely absent from college campuses today whereas the Leftist morality of altruism pervades higher education.

Part of the reason for this, Gotthelf said, is that the first-mentioned principle of Objectivist morality isn’t defended or advanced in American society. Instead, Gotthelf said, “people are imbued with the moral sense that lies behind socialism” in their places of worship, schools and families throughout their lives and, although they are “too American” to accept the political dimensions of socialism, they buy in to its morality.

This acceptance of altruism constitutes a perversion of that first liberating impulse that many students’ encounter when they arrive at college: the new responsibility for one’s thoughts and actions. Rather than accept the Left’s second-hand ideal of altruism and self-sacrifice, students should fully pursue that first impulse.

Of course, I realize that, as Gotthelf said, “it’s not easy to be first-hand.” The groups dedicated to saving Darfur, unionizing university employees or volunteering on alternative spring breaks all tug at the emotional heartstrings of college students and conform nicely to the socialist ethic of altruism that pervades our society. Indeed, scoffing at these groups and their goals seems callous on a campus where we are told regularly that we are privileged and need to give back to those less fortunate.

Students who already reject the second-handedness of Leftist altruism must overcome this pressure and begin to defend this first principle of Objectivism if the ideological makeup of college campuses is ever going to change. It’s no longer enough to oppose the specific political initiatives of the Left because its embrace of altruism as morality makes it far stronger – on campuses and around the country – than the Right will ever be until it acknowledges and advances the morality of its cause.

We must be clear that the rational pursuit of self-interest is a moral action and that the only way to live is to live a life for oneself rather than for others.

Robert Heinlein – and maybe Robert Anton Wilson or J. Neil Schulman if you’ve really done your homework – defined libertarianism for a lot of people in the second half of the 20^th century. But the influence of science fiction authors over the libertarian movement isn’t surprising because they – like us – imagine new ways of life. Heinlein was probably most explicit in imagining new ways of life without government but this proto-libertarian strain runs through a lot of science fiction and can be found in the work of the most mainstream author from Harry Turtledove to Terry Pratchett.

But even though it’s not uncommon to encounter a whiff of libertarianism in science fiction, it is rare that one reads a science fiction novel that both advances science fiction and promises to advance our understanding of personal liberty. Rare though it may be, this is the case in Ken MacLeod’s 1995 masterwork “The Star Fraction.” A maelstrom of delightfully radical ideologies, the world of “The Star Fraction” is centered on a fractured England where hundreds of microstates rule territory once unified under a republican government. This environment of ideological ferment was the most enjoyable part of the book because it took modern ideologies and stretched them to their logical limits. The environmentalists have their society, the anarchists have their territory and MacLeod even fleshes out a fundamentalist Christian microstate replete with theocratic dictatorship and banned books.

This ability to realistically portray unreal – at least to the early 21^st century reader – societies is but a part of MacLeod’s ability to capture extreme possibilities in detailed, realistic prose. For instance, my favorite possibility portrayed in “The Star Fraction” was the existence of competing defense agencies. A pet subject for anarcho-capitalists since the 19^th century, the idea of competing defense agencies replacing national militaries fascinates me and MacLeod depicts this possibility in a way that makes it seem natural at the same time it explores the system’s logical strengths and weaknesses. MacLeod demonstrates this same skill of seamless description in the hard science aspects of his novel where he tackles virtual reality, artificial intelligence and smart drugs. Most importantly, MacLeod tackles all of these hard science possibilities in an accessible, fast-paced and entertaining fashion making his voice one of the most enjoyable of all the hard science fiction authors I’ve encountered.

All these aspects of “The Star Fraction” combine to make it an ideologically provocative example of science fiction that is bound to make individuals of every political persuasion think. Indeed, MacLeod’s version of the near future had me thinking about my politics – and their feasibility – the entire time I was reading. It’s this provocative nature of the novel that makes it valuable to libertarians and individualists who have so often seen their best ideas developed or expanded in popular fiction. What’s so special about “The Star Fraction” is that MacLeod combines this value with a fast-pace narrative and tight style of prose. For all these reasons, MacLeod’s “The Star Fraction” is a novel I can recommend without reservation.

“…the Western democracies are socialist! Big public sectors, big companies that plan production while officially everything’s on the market … sort of black planning, like the East had a black market. Marx said universal suffrage was the rule of the working class, and he was right. The West is Red!”

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been trading comments with Chris Potter over at Slag Heap on City Council’s attempts at central planning or maybe it’s the giant hammer and sickle sitting on the front page of this blog, but this subject has been on my mind for a while and MacLeod captured it brilliantly in the above passage.

The West is Red and it isn’t that way because of a single revolution, election or dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, socialism has and is making steady progress in the United States thanks to the efforts of self-described “progressives” who desire equality in means rather than equality in opportunity.

I’m probably going to tackle the question of political labels in my first Pitt News column after the break. Until then, this is just a quote that I think many of you might find instructive or particularly poignant in its directness.

At issue was the decision of Aramark – the company contracted to provide concessions at the Mellon Arena – to have its current employees reapply for work as it moves operations across the street to the new Consol Energy Center.

The employees were understandably unhappy with having to reapply for their jobs and so their unions created a public relations nightmare for the Penguins and Aramark and evidently put pressure on City Council to intervene. Well, City Council intervened today with a letter – written by Bruce Kraus and reprinted at City Paper’s Slag Heap – that reads like a Leftist’s guide to overreaching a local government’s authority and meddling in business decisions to score political points.

Truly, the entire letter is worth reading as an exemplar of neo-Soviet prose. But the best part is the ending: “the Pittsburgh City Council will not stand-by and allow ARAMARK, or others, to put hardworking citizens out of work or create jobs that do not pay prevailing wages and meet area union standards.”

The assertion that the City Council has a role in the hiring and firing practices of a private corporation is silly and arrogant but its underlying assumption – that local government has the right to centrally plan this city’s economy – is absolutely dangerous. Simply put, central planning doesn’t work and it leads to the concentration of power in the hands of government officials who use that power to curtail the freedom and liberty of individual citizens.

Central planning aside, City Council should also realize that the state is at about 9 percent unemployment and no worker is guaranteed a job when there are others willing to take his or her place for less money. It’s called competition and it’s not exactly heartwarming during a recession but who is City Council to deny the unemployed a chance to compete for these jobs in the Consol Energy Center?

Whatever union standards the Democratic machine hews to and whatever it considers to be a prevailing wage has little relevance during a recession when there’s competition for jobs.

I don’t spend much time thinking about the UN and I generally consider it to be a useless organization beneath my notice but this is just amazing. The stooge in question, Ali Abdussalam Treki, served as foreign minister to the Gaddafi dictatorship during the 70s and 80s and, in an effort to prove he’s as crazy as his boss, he made sure to denounce homosexuals during his first press conference as President of the General Assembly.

So, to my friends and readers who believe in globalism and the United Nations, I challenge you to defend the organization that would elect a dictator’s lapdog to serve as their president.

But like Lazarus from the grave, Democratic health care reform reappeared Monday as a new proposal, drafted by the White House, that combines elements of both the Senate and House bills. Although repackaged, the White House’s proposal is simply a patchwork imitation of the bills that were consistently rejected by the American people in elections and polls around the country.

Indeed, the latest data from Newsweek shows that, as of Feb. 18^th, only 40 percent of registered voters support Barack Obama’s health care reform plan whereas 49 oppose it. Furthermore, an aggregation of polling data from Jan. 20^th to Feb. 18^th compiled by RealClearPolitics shows that, on average, Americans oppose the President’s plan by a margin of 14.3 percent.

Clearly, the Democrats’ dogged pursuit of health care reform is not about representing the will of the American people but instead it is about pursuing a radically divergent conception of rights and imposing this conception on our nation.

The proof is in how Leftists – both nationally and on our campus – dogmatically describe health care as a human right. Traditionally, American rights are individual rights to action or freedom from government intrusion: the First Amendment’s right to free speech, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy, etc.

But where America’s Founding rights guarantee individuals the freedom to say and do things free from onerous government intervention, the vision of rights enshrined in Democratic health care reform is a socialist construct that elevates the government above the individual and places it in charge of private industry.

For instance, in a major expansion of government power over the individual, the President’s proposal mandates that individuals purchase health insurance or pay a significant fine. In a similar expansion of government authority over private corporations, Obama proposed that the secretary of health and human services be given new authority to either approve or void insurance premium increases.

The President’s proposal to expand government power is crafted in a way to make opposition difficult; after all, it is almost impossible to defend before the American people the ability of insurance companies to raise premiums by 39 percent.

But Obama’s attempt to pass health care reform on a tidal wave of populist regulation demonstrates the inability of Democrats to pass this reform through an honest debate on its merits rather than on the perceived evils of one insurance company. Remember, as the market stands today, consumers unhappy with a premium increase can at least drop their insurance and purchase a new one or not purchase one at all whereas Obama’s proposal would create a less flexible market.

And while these instances of expanded regulations and individual mandates do demonstrate the Democrats’ socialist conception of rights, by far its most threatening conclusion is that health care is a right.

Unlike the First, Second or Fourth Amendments mentioned above, the right to health care is an imposition on other Americans because the health care has to come from somewhere. It is an assertion that Americans have the right to another individual’s labor – in this case the labor of doctors, nurses, hospital administrators etc. – regardless of whether or not they can pay for that service.

In this way, what is construed as one person’s right is in actuality another individual’s burden and not necessarily just the burden of Americans in the health care industry but the burden of every taxpayer.

Indeed, as we debate this shift in rights in this country from the rights of the individual to act to the rights of the many to receive, we would do well to consider the nation’s founding and the opinions of its Founders. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, described a good government as one “which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned….”

The fact that Obama’s proposal and the reorientation of rights at its foundation violates both of Jefferson’s requirements for good government should give us pause as we travel down this road to serfdom.

The group will receive student activity money in what should be recognized as a major step forward for advocates of the Second Amendment on area college campuses. A similar organization functioned at the University of Pittsburgh in 2008 but is no longer a registered group on campus.

Individuals over the age of 21 can apply for a License to Carry Firearms at their county sheriff’s office and said license allows them to legally carry a concealed firearm in Pennsylvania. Regardless of whether or not the student is a permit holder, area campuses ban students from possessing firearms on campus.

For instance, consider the fact that Pittsburgh’s road salt budget for 2010 is $559,640 – down $400,000 from last year. This drastic cut in the road salt budget may seem like a small issue to some readers but it is indicative of how government priorities differ from taxpayer priorities.

Importantly, road salt spending wasn’t reduced as part of an across-the-board budget reduction. City revenue for 2010 increased by more than $5.6 million and city expenditures increased by almost $10 million so we know that the cut in road salt spending wasn’t brought about by a fiscal crisis.

Indeed, the budget of the Department of Public Works Bureau of Operations – the bureau responsible for snow removal and road salt purchasing – is the only division of Public Works to have its budget cut this year.

But even though the city spent less on road salt, it still found the money to spend $264,554 on the Equal Opportunity Review Commission – that’s a $10,000 increase from last year and a $78,624 increase from 2008. The Commission’s website describes its purpose thus: “The Equal Opportunity Review Commission (EORC) assists Minority Business Enterprise / Women Business Enterprise (MBE/WBE) with prime contracting opportunities.”

Of course the Commission is a symptom of City regulations that require that “Contractors must make a ‘good faith effort’ to include minority- and women-owned businesses on City and County authority contracts.” Symptom or not, when the budget for a diversity commission goes up and the budget for road salt goes down, the whole city suffers.

But if you listened to city politicians, you’d never guess that the road salt budget was cut as government officials consistently promise that they will do better at snow removal in future years. For instance, after the city failed in the cleanup of another major February storm in 2008, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl declared a “War on Snow” and promised to do everything possible to “make sure the city does a better job keeping streets free of snow and ice,” the Post-Gazette reported.

Fast-forward to last week and the Mayor admitted that the city didn’t have enough resources to clear Pittsburgh streets just as he issued a call for private contractors to contact the city if they could help in the snow removal effort.

In criticizing the city’s response to the snow storm and the evident discrepancies between what politicians say when people are looking and how they construct a budget when people aren’t watching, it’s important to recognize the work of Public Works employees who did their best during the storm. These employees pulled 12 hour shifts to clear city streets but they were betrayed by a city government that doesn’t have its priorities straight.

The response to the storm and the conflict between the priorities of politicians and people demonstrates that we would do best to pay private firms to provide us with those services we previously thought of as necessarily governmental in scope. It would cost residents a great deal less to contract with a private firm to remove snow than it costs in taxes to the city because such a private firm wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a diversity commission.

I also suspect that no private firm would employ individuals like Shawn Beck, union steward for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2719, who complained during the storm that city meter readers were being asked to shovel snow around city garages without “the training that they need to be shown how to properly shovel snow.”

The logistics of private firms being hired by individuals or neighborhoods to plow streets would have to be figured out but reducing snow removal to a private business transaction is at least worth a shot in light of the city’s absolute inability to cope with snowfall year after year. A private solution to snow removal would have the added benefit of allowing private citizens to set priorities and determine how their money is spent giving Pittsburghers control over a process that government consistently fails to execute efficiently.