Richard W. Rahn, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, writes, “The longest-running scam is the big lie that more government spending will create jobs and raise wages.” In order to believe this scam, you have to believe that government is more efficient than the private sector.

In the wake of MIT professor Gruber’s troubling discloser that the legislation for Obamacare was based on a series of lies, Mr. Rahn hopes that Americans now will wake up to the political reality of the many other highly damaging policy frauds taking place in Washington—from Dodd-Frank to the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act to the attempt to increase the minimum wage.

Richard writes, “The whole socialist and big-government ideal is predicated on the notion that the intellectuals can bring us nirvana.” Read more here about the “experts,” many of whom, while living off taxpayer-funded grants, claim to be smarter than the markets and to know what’s best for Americans.

Bloomberg has now reported that “President Barack Obama’s top military adviser said more U.S. troops may be needed in Iraq for a ‘long and difficult’ fight against Islamic State.”

Reading this, with great displeasure, the first American Defense and Foreign Policy expert I wanted to hear from is my #1 rated expert in the field, the Cato Institute’s Chris Preble. (Debbie and I are significant Cato Institute Benefactors).

Read Chris’ prompt response:

U.S. soldiers on the front line against ISIS?

Short answer: no. Long answer: no.

The ISIS threat, in general, has been overstated. The ISIS threat to the United States is completely disconnected from reality.

The absurdity is revealed when Hagel says at one point that it is an existential threat, and Dempsey says in other testimony that we shouldn’t get more deeply involved unless the Iraqis form a unity government.

If the threat were as grave as Hagel says, why should we care whether Sunnis are enfranchised or not? We wouldn’t. The fact that this is a serious consideration tells you a lot about the nature of the threat.

It also tells you a lot about the real problem, and where Dempsey gets it right. Unless Iraq’s political problems are solved, no amount of U.S. military force will make much difference. This was also true, by the way, of the surge. U.S. troops fought and died in the spring and summer of 2007, and violence declined (not just because of the surge, but that’s another story).

But the U.S. did not have then, and does not have now, the power to reshape Iraq’s broken politics.

Back to ISIS – they are already bumping up against some people who will actually stand and fight them. U.S. bombs and missiles might have slowed ISIS’s progress, and that is fine, but the idea of having U.S. troops fighting them is utterly absurd.

And, by the way, the people on the ground (even the good guys) aren’t entirely thrilled about the bombs, either.

“The Costs of War Project” by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University was profiled by Reuters in an outstanding March 2013 essay by Daniel Trotta. Here are some frightening statistics from the Iraq war as outlined by the study:

1. The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number.
2. The U.S war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades.
3. A 2011 update of the original study showed that U.S. medical and disability claims for veterans after a decade of war totaled $33 billion. Two years later, that number had risen to $134.7 billion.

Mr. Trotta reports, “The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it.”

Although not official by any standards, a benchmark definition of a middle-class income is approximately $25,000 to $75,000 a year. Why the $50,000 gap? To take into account the cost of living between, say, San Fran and Des Moines, Iowa. So if you earn a middle-class income and a live in a state with high taxes, you probably face a total tax burden of nearly one-quarter of your income.

In a recent piece in NRO, the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner writes about why the November mid-term elections turned out as they did: “American voters are clearly fed up with a government that demands ever more and more of their money.” In example after example, in red states and blue, voters have clearly said enough is enough, but, as Mr. Tanner asks, “Is anyone listening?” Read more here.

Related map:

Who has the answer to this pivotal question? The Cato Institute’s Justin Logan is who you want to rely on for the straight, unbiased answer. I put the question above to Justin this morning.

Here’s his answer:

Iran has no nuclear weapons, correct. What constitutes a “nuclear weapons program” is a weird definitional/epistemological question, and part of the reason we got into such tumult over the 2007 NIE.

The short version is that many of the elements of nuclear technology we worry about are useable for both weapons and power generation. Some of the biggest, most important elements, in fact. But when you hear people say “Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” that’s polemic that’s unsupported by what we know of the facts at present. They are doing things that unnerve us because those things would be central to any effort to produce a nuclear weapon in the future, but there are big missing pieces at present that ought to preclude responsible people from flinging around the phrase “nuclear weapons program.”

The most important fact given current controversies is that Iran is further away from a bomb than it was in January due to its near-total compliance with the provisions of the JPOA. There is a necessary condition Iran would need to meet to produce a bomb, and its behavior under the JPOA has moved it further away from a bomb than it was in January. (Iran essentially downgraded some of its enriched uranium, which moved it further away from meeting that necessary condition.)

Nobody is saying this, but it seems terribly important if we’re going to evaluate what the JPOA produced and how to move forward.

Read some more on this issue here.

Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, spent his career developing strategies to keep America safe. Here Dr. Scheuer writes about the unconstitutional power President Barack Obama “is blithely wielding.”

The net result of Obama’s studied and incremental rise to the status of tyrant is that ordinary, hardworking Americans now have genuine, honorable, and actionable motivations to reclaim many of the powers that their ancestors delegated to the national government in the settlement of 1787. Indeed, they have more substantive and obvious reasons to reclaim their powers and liberty than did men who acted against British tyranny in 1775, and certainly much more substantive reasons to consider secession than did the Southern secessionists in 1861.

What is the remedy to Obama’s tyranny? Well, as my pro-Israel and other assorted admirers never tire of saying, Scheuer is a bear of little brain — “After all, he went to university in Canada, you know?!” So let me step aside and provide a few pertinent comments by men we can all agree are far smarter than this aging and, by most accounts, halfwit former-intelligence officer. The following words come from America’s Founders and those whose writings markedly influenced them, and their upshot for Americans was well said by Julius Caesar in his admonition that “heaven helps those who help themselves.”

–CICERO: “For it is not by some accident — no, it is because our own moral failings — that we are left with the name of the Republic, having long since lost its substance.”

–CICERO: “Most foolish of all is the belief that everything decreed by the institutions or laws of a particular country is just.”

–SENECA: “There can be slaine/No sacrifice to God more acceptable/Than an unjust and wicked king.”

–SALLUST: “All human beings who want to be superior to other animals ought to struggle with every resource not to be like cattle passing through life silently.”

–TACITUS: “All that is achieved by submissiveness is that heavier burdens are imposed, as if we found them easier to bear.”

–THUCYDIDES: “I do not blame those who wish to rule, but those who are too ready to serve. It is just as much in men’s nature to rule those who submit to them, as it is to resist those who molest them.”

–DAVID HUME: “The right of self-preservation is unalienable in every individual, much more in every community.”

–REV. RICHARD HOOKER: “Laws therefore are not, which public consent hath not made so….”

–JOHN MILTON: “… turning to tyranny, they [the tryants] may be as lawfully despos’d and punish’d, as they were at first elected.”

–JOHN MILTON: “… justice done upon a tyrant is no more but the necessary self-defense of the whole Commonwealth.”

–ALGERNON SYDNEY: “The perpetual jarrings we hear everyday; the division of the nation into such factions as threaten us with ruin, and all the disorders we see or fear, are the affects of this rupture. These things are not to be imputed to our original constitutions, but to those who have subverted them.”

–ALGERNON SYDNEY: “They [the people] know how to preserve their liberty, or to vindicate the violation of it; and the more patient they have been, the more inflexible they are when they resolve to be so no longer. Those who are so foolish to put them upon such courses, do to their cost find that there is a difference between lions and asses; and he is a fool who knows not that swords were given to men, that none might be slaves, but such as know not how to use them”

–JAMES HARRINGTON: “… the liberty of the commonwealth consists in the empire of the laws, the absence whereof would betray her to the lusts of tyrants.”

–REV. JONATHAN MAYHEW: “For the essence of slavery consists in being subjected to the arbitrary pleasures of others, whether many, few, or one, it matters not.”

–JOSIAH QUINCY: ‘[T]he supreme power is ever possessed by those who have arms in their hands and are disciplined in the use of them…”

–JAMES MADISON: “If there be a principle that ought not to be questioned within the United States, it is, that every nation has a right to abolish an old government and establish a new one.”

–JAMES IREDELL: “The only real security in any country is the jealousy and circumspection of the people themselves. Let them be watchful over their rulers. Should they find a combination against their liberties, and all other methods appear insufficient to preserve them, they have, thank God, an ultimate remedy. The power which created the government can destroy it.”

–ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: “Like all serious and reflective peoples, Americans have a vindictive temperment. They almost never forget an offense; but it is not easy to offend them, and their resentment is as slow to ignited, as to be extinguished.”

President Obama, asserting a legal and constitutional authority he himself said he did not have, is going rogue issuing an executive amnesty to 4 to 5 million illegal aliens, writes Pat Buchanan.

Rand Paul, in a RANDPAC communiqué, writes that he is 100% committed to stopping President Obama’s immigration executive order by any means necessary. “The executive is forbidden from making law. His (Obama) constitutional duty is to uphold and enforce our nation’s immigration laws.’” Rand continues, “President Obama’s executive orders defy not only the will of Congress and the rule of law, but also the American people.”

Sen. Paul writes:

History will not treat Barack Obama kindly if he thinks he can become a king.

Tonight he is expected to announce he will waive his royal pen and impose so-called “immigration reform” through fiat.

This unconstitutional power grab violates the separation of powers established by our founding document.

And I am 100% committed to stopping President Obama’s unconstitutional immigration executive orders by any means necessary.

You see, the executive is forbidden from making law.

His constitutional duty is to uphold and enforce our nation’s immigration laws.

That’s why on 22 previous occasions Barack Obama declared he did not have the power to impose “immigration reform” through fiat.

President Obama’s executive orders defy not only the will of Congress and the rule of law, but also the American people.

So in response, I’m announcing an emergency “Stop Obama’s Immigration Lawlessness” Action Bomb today.

With the House of Representatives set to return to session on December 1st, it’s vital RANDPAC get as many Americans as possible on the record opposing President Obama’s executive amnesty.

RANDPAC has a plan to generate a grassroots uprising through online and social media ads, fax petitions, phone calls and email.

But I’m counting on your support to make it happen by taking action before November 23rd.

You see, regardless of a policy being good, bad or indifferent we must respect the Constitution and President Obama’s immigration executive orders trash our separation of powers.

Also, immigration reform without first securing the border isn’t immigration reform at all.

Congress must employ every tool in its tool kit to halt unconstitutional immigration executive orders.

That includes opposing any omnibus funding bill that includes money for the Obama administration to carry out these unconstitutional executive orders.

You see, it was President Obama himself who bragged that all of his policies – especially his calls for “immigration reform” – were on the ballot November 4th.

And the voters rejected his “immigration reform” schemes lock, stock, and barrel.

Americans elected Republicans to STOP President Obama’s disastrous agenda.

But to accomplish this, RANDPAC needs to kick up a grassroots tidal wave to force my colleagues to slam the brakes on President Obama’s unconstitutional power grab.

Your support helped me defeat an attempt on Thursday to reauthorize the “Patriot Act,” but I’m going to need to count on you again today.

I’m committed to pulling out all the stops to reverse President Obama’s illegal immigration executive orders.

Article II Section 2 of the Constitution specifically enumerates the powers of the President. The list is small. There is wording on treaties, appointing ambassadors and other public ministers, and filling vacancies. That is about it. There is no wording that would empower a president, especially without support from Congress or the American people, to issue executive amnesty to millions of illegals.