In 2009 the Washington establishment and the national media feigned outrage over the fact that Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois had been selling political favors. The governor had apparently been taking “bids” for Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat since he, as governor, was entitled to appoint Obama’s replacement.

Several years ago the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the left-wing activist group that Barack Obama was employed by after leaving law school, was in the news after one of its “tax counselors” was videotaped giving advice on tax evasion to two people posing as a pimp and a prostitute. The imposters told the “counselor” that they wanted a government-subsidized loan to open a brothel where they would house dozens of teenage girls they would bring into the country illegally from Central America.

In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed into law a “freedom to farm” bill that was supposed to end most farm subsidies. At the time, the primary form of farm subsidy was price supports—price floors that are forcefully imposed by the state that are above free-market prices.

As soon as the federal government announced its multi-trillion dollar bailouts of Wall Street plutocrats during the first years of The Great Recession, defenders of the bailouts pulled out what they apparently considered was a secret weapon: the myth of Alexander Hamilton as the supposed inventor of American capitalism.

Of all the Republican presidential candidates in 2011–2012, only Ron Paul espoused the American foreign policy philosophy of Washington and Jefferson. For this he, and all other like-minded statesmen over the past seven decades, have been misleadingly smeared as “isolationists.” In this context, “isolationist” is truly Orwellian. By advocating peace and free trade, and only supporting just and defensive war, Ron Paul is advocating the maximum possible interaction between the peoples of the world.

In the late 1970s University of Rochester economists William Meckling and Michael Jensen presented a theory of “liberal” bias in the media that was based on a rigorous exploration of how the media best pursue their own self interest, coupled with an analysis of the role of government in shaping that self interest.

Americans—and much of the rest of the world—have been deprived of one of the most important means of establishing and maintaining a free society, namely, federalism or states’ rights. It is not just an accident that states’ rights have either been relegated to the memory hole or denigrated as a tool of racists.