I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Had the United States and the United Kingdom gone on alone to capture Baghdad, under the provisions of the Geneva and Hague conventions we would have been considered occupying powers and therefore would have been responsible for all the costs of maintaining or restoring government, education and other services for the people of Iraq.
Like Syria, the government of Bahrain employs aggressive tactics to censor and monitor its people's online activity.
I did not forsee a day where the government had to intervene to bail out basically everybody.
When we are asked to bail out corporations and banks, or pass tax bills that shift billions in public dollars out of government, we must ask ourselves, who were we truly sent here to advocate for?
In the United States, the government is bailing out banks, intervening in the economy, yet in Latin America, the Right continues to talk about 'free markets.' It's totally outdated; they don't have arguments; they don't have any sense.
If you or I fail at business, we fail. If we cheat and fail, we go to jail. But if you're rich and politically connected, your incompetence may be protected by a government bailout.
The Tea Party grew out of indignation over the Wall Street bailout - an indignation shared by the vast majority of Americans. But the Tea Party ended up directing its ire at government rather than at big business and Wall Street.
State constitutions typically provide that the state first has to service its debt, then make it pension payments, and then pay for services. What we don't know is whether that order will be enforced. And ultimately, the busted state is going to be looking to the federal government for a bailout. Think Greece, but on a much bigger scale.
Barack Obama likes to point to General Motors as the poster child for the job creation success of his economic policies. However, whatever your sentiments about the government's bailout of General Motors, for every job Barack Obama 'saved-or-created' in the U.S. there were two jobs off shore.
After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have. But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country.
Since my election as Oklahoma attorney general in 2010, I have been a proud member of a group of federalism-minded state attorneys general who have methodically, indeed relentlessly, worked to restore the proper balance of power between the federal government and the states.
It is time we passed a balanced budget amendment and return this government to limited spending.
We still have a major problem in debt with America that we have to find efficiencies in government to get us back to a balanced budget.
The founders had a strong distrust for centralized power in a federal government. So they created a government with checks and balances. This was to prevent any branch of the government from becoming too powerful.
The Republican majority, left to its own devices from 1995 to 2000, was a party committed to limited government and restoring the balances of federalism with the states. Clearly, President Bush has had a different vision, and that vision has resulted in education and welfare policies that have increased the size and scope of government.
We all learn in school that the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government must check and balance each other. But other non state institutions must participate in this important system of checks and balances as well. These checking institutions include the academy, the media, religious institutions and NGOs.
The 20th century shows that the form of government that we take for granted, a constitutional democratic republic with checks and balances and a rule of law - that form of government is usually temporary.
In summary, the Romans were opposed to tyranny in any form; and the feature of government to which they gave the most thought was an elaborate system of checks and balances.
Government does create prosperity and growth by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive; balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism - it's essential to it.
