"And let us not forget that the Constitution grants Congress..."

"And let us not forget that the Constitution grants Congress, and Congress alone, the authority to regulate trade and craft tax laws.  Congress cannot cede that authority to the WTO or any other international body.  Nor can the president legally sign any treaty that purports to do so.  Our Founders never intended for America to become entangled in global trade schemes, and they certainly never intended to have our domestic laws overridden by international bureaucrats." -Pave 99 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"This outrageous affront to our national sovereignty..."

"This outrageous affront to our national sovereignty was of course predictable when we joined the WTO.  During congressional debates we were assured that entry into the organization posed no threat to our sovereignty.  A well-known libertarian think tank, where you might expect some skepticism of a supra-national bureaucracy managing trade, offered us this rosy description: "The WTO's dispute settlement mechanism helps nations resolve trade disputes without resorting to costly trade wars.  The system relies on voluntary compliance and does not compromise national sovereignty."  That was nonsense.  A Congressional Research Service report was quite clear about the consequences of our membership: "As a member of the WTO, the United States does commit to act in accordance with the rules of the multi-lateral body.  It is legally obligated to insure that national laws do not conflict with WTO rules."

The WTO has given us the worst of both worlds:  we've sacrificed national sovereignty by changing our domestic laws at the behest of an international body, yet we still face trade wars over a variety of products.  If anything, the WTO makes trade relations worse by providing our foreign competitors with a collective means to attack U.S. trade interests." -Page 98 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"To establish genuine free trade, no such transfer of power..."

"To establish genuine free trade, no such transfer of power is necessary.  True free trade does not require treaties or agreements between governments.  On the contrary, true freed trade occurs in the absence of government intervention in the free flow of goods across borders.  Organizations like the WTO and NAFTA represent government-managed trade schemes, not free trade.  The WTO, purported to exist to lower tariffs, is actually the agency that grants permission for tariffs to be applied when complaints of dumping are levied.  Government-managed trade is inherently political, meaning that politicians and bureaucrats determine who wins and loses in the marketplace. 

Granting quasi-governmental international bodies the power to make decisions about American trade rules compromises American sovereignty in dangerous and unacceptable ways."  -Pages 96 & 97 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"HMOs have become corporate, bureaucratic middlemen..."

"HMOs have become corporate, bureaucratic middlemen in our health care system, driving up costs while degrading the quality of medical care. In all other industries, technology has nearly always led to lower prices- except in health care, thanks to the managed-care system that has been forced upon us." -Page 87 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed..."

"Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed, when he visited our country in the nineteenth century, to see how many voluntary associations Americans had formed in order to achieve common goals.   "The political associations which exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country," he wrote.  "Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the Government in France, or man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association." De Tocqueville admired "the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it."

That may be all well and good for the arts and the like, some may say, but private efforts could never substitute for gigantic government budgets for various forms of welfare.  But private assistance would not need to match these budgets dollar for dollar.  As much as 70 percent of welfare budgets has been eaten up by bureaucracy.  Moreover, government programs are far more easily abused, and the money they dispense more readily becomes a destructive habit, than with more local or private forms of assistance. 

Why would we expect a system based on legal plunder, as ours is, to be a net benefit to the poor or middle class, in whose name so many government schemes are enacted?  Every one of the special benefits, on behalf of which hundreds of millions of dollars are expended on lobbyists every year, makes goods more expensive, companies less efficient and competitive, and the economy more sluggish.  Given that the politically influential and well connected- neither of which includes the middle class or the poor- are the ones who tend to win privileges and loot from government, I do not understand why we take for granted that the net result of all this looting is good for those who are lower on the economic ladder.  And when the loot is paid for by printing more money and causing inflation, which (as I show in the chapter on money) disproportionately harms the most vulnerable, the suggestions that the least prosperous are helped by all this intervention collapses into outright farce." -Pages 75 & 76 of The Revolution, A Manifesto

"Once our government does become involved in something...."

"Once our government does become involved in something, intellectual and institutional inertia tends to keep it there for good.  People lose their political imagination.  It becomes impossible to conceive of dealing with the matter in any other way. Repealing the new bureaucracy becomes unthinkable.  Mythology about how terrible things were in the old days becomes the conventional wisdom." -Page 74 of The Revolution, A Manifesto