Vin Suprynowicz

Last week, we were discussing the Obama administration’s anti-freedom agenda.

When a political leader snidely ridicules the free market, characterizing those who challenge his initiatives to vastly expand federal regulation and management of the economy as being in the pay of “greedy insurance executives,” “big bankers,” and the like, I don’t see how anyone can argue that he’s not against the free market.

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Last week, we were discussing the Obama administration’s anti-freedom, anti-capitalist agenda.

When a political leader snidely ridicules the free market, characterizing those who challenge his initiatives to vastly expand federal regulation and management of the economy as being in the pay of “greedy insurance executives,” “big bankers,” and the like, I don’t see how anyone can argue he’s not against the free market.

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Back in 1996, Congress swore it was finally going to wean American farmers off taxpayer subsidies with the “Freedom to Farm” law. The law “allowed” farmers greater flexibility in their planting decisions and moved toward greater reliance on market supply and demand, further offering farmers big one-time payments in exchange for their promise to accept a phasing out of subsidies.

Farmers took the big one-time payments — but then instead of accepting reduced subsidies of “only” $47 billion from 1996 to 2002, they promptly started lobbying for large “supplemental” farm bills which ended up BOOSTING their subsidies to $121 billion over that period.

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And the Clueless Ones in Washington just can’t figure out why struggling American small business owners, uncertain about how the rules will be changed next, are reluctant to hire new employees.

“Fresh off passage of a sweeping health care overhaul, the Obama administration is supporting legislation to provide mandatory paid sick leave for more than 30 million additional workers,” McClatchy newspapers reported last week.

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I don’t think Barack Obama tells the truth.

Yes, voters had fair warning of this ambitious young man’s long associations with radical America-haters and self-described Communists including the literal bomb-makers of the Weather Underground (at least, those who managed to avoid blowing themselves up with their paramours in Greenwich Village in 1970.)

Even if, in “Dreams from my Father,” Mr. Obama coyly omitted much background information on his Communist mentor, Frank Marshal Davis. (How many books, exclusively about himself, has Mr. Obama now written? Should narcissism be a concern, here?)

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Every time I make some passing reference in print to the tyrant Lincoln, as I did a few weeks ago, a fair number of readers insist on proving the dangers of letting unionized government functionaries “educate” our children.

I believe we can confidently presume most who rail “Such a bizarre and outlandish statement proves what dangerous wackos Suprynowicz and his conservative pals are!” (I’m a libertarian; I’ve never claimed to be a “conservative”) are government-school ex-inmates.

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Maj. Nidal Hasan was not drafted. He chose to become a U.S. Army officer because that way he could get American taxpayers to finance his medical education. And because he was a medical officer, the chance he would ever have been asked to discharge a firearm in the direction of an enemy combatant — even if deployed to a war zone — would have been minimal. His job, ironically enough, would have been psychiatric counseling of American troops.

Yet Hasan, an Arab Muslim Virginian whose family hails from Palestine, worried aloud repeatedly about being sent to Afghanistan where he might be asked to take part in a war effort against “fellow Muslims.”

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In last week’s column, I’d walked into a local comics shop with some “Silver Age” Marvel and D.C. comic books from the early 1960s, comics with 10-cent cover prices theoretically cataloguing at hundreds of dollars each, but actually in typical “fair to very good” worn condition and thus not likely to retail at more than 10 percent of that.

Asked what percentage of his shelf price he intended to pay me, the proprietor told me “Twenty percent.”

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Americans are generally willing to make considerable sacrifices in order to pay the taxes that fund the most expensive public school system in the history of the world — even though the effectiveness of said schools in advancing our students much beyond what the rest the “first world” would call a fourth- or fifth-grade level is pretty pathetic.

But what if Americans come to realize the giant jobs program they’re financing under the rubric of the “public schools” is no longer mostly about “schooling,” at all, but has instead morphed into a huge archipelago of food banks and full-service welfare agencies?

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In full accord on the perceived “global threat” (The AP reports), “world leaders” Tuesday endorsed President Barack Obama’s call to secure all nuclear materials around the globe within four years to keep them out of the grasp of terrorists. They offered few specifics for achieving that goal. But as 47 nations including Armenia, Morocco, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam signed on the dotted line, President Obama declared “the American people will be safer and the world will be more secure” as a result.

Hopefully the Moroccans didn’t drive too hard a bargain.

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