Category Archives: Featured

Earth to Bill Maher: Edward Snowden isn’t the crazy one

TAMPA, January 21, 2014 – Bill Maher interviewed journalist Glenn Greenwald following President Obama’s speech on Friday in which the president discussed his proposals to reform the NSA. Greenwald is the journalist who first reported on the information released by Edward Snowden on the government’s domestic surveillance activities.

While Maher was respectful of Greenwald and, to some extent, Snowden, he went out of his way to smear some of Snowden’s claims about the government’s activities as “completely nuts.” He also found it necessary to take a shot at Ron Paul, who wasn’t even involved in the issue at hand.

For Maher and too many likeminded people, anyone who doesn’t view the government as a benevolent force for good is a tinfoil-hat-wearing kook who believes all civilian life is the target of a massive conspiracy involving the government, secret societies, aliens, etc. Thus Maher’s retort, “Everyone in the government isn’t out to get you.”

That’s what’s known as “framing the debate.” You’re either with Bill Maher and President Obama or you’re with the kooks. You may also be somewhere in the middle, where Maher apparently places Snowden. It completely ignores the many other perspectives one might have, including that of most libertarians.

Libertarians don’t believe that the people who work for the government are evil. It’s the institution of government itself, a monopoly on the use of force that can martial the resources of the entire nation. That kind of power is dangerous even when used by good people with good intentions.

Read the rest of the article at The Huffington Post…

Obama’s proposed NSA reforms prove he doesn’t understand checks and balances

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President Obama delivered a speech on Friday outlining his plans to address the widespread outrage over the domestic surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. However well-intentioned, the president’s proposals indicate he just doesn’t get the constitutional notion of delegated powers.

Implicit in the Fourth Amendment is the principle that the government should remain powerless unless and until an individual is reasonably suspected of having committed a crime. It isn’t even allowed to search one’s person or papers (viz. phone records, emails) to collect the proof it needs until it persuades a judge that it has probable cause.

The only reason the Fourth Amendment offers any protection is it prescribes an adversarial process. The judicial branch is predisposed to refuse to issue a warrant until the executive branch provides sufficient evidence of probable cause.

Read the rest of the article at the Daily Caller…

Obama’s NSA speech proves government can’t prevent terrorism in a free society

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TAMPA, January 18, 2014 – President Obama outlined his proposed reforms of the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities in a speech on Friday. The speech was at times eloquent and the president’s intentions appear genuine, but his recommendations for reform are inadequate. As long as the government is trying to prevent crime or terrorism in the future, it’s going to trample liberty in the present.

The president stated the crux of the problem during his speech:

“So we demanded [after 9/11] that our intelligence community improve its capabilities and that law enforcement change practices to focus more on preventing attacks before they happen than prosecuting terrorists after an attack.”

Freedom requires that the government not attempt to prevent anything. All powers granted to the government relate to crimes committed in the past.

The Bill of Rights rests upon this assumption. Rooted in what is now called the “libertarian” principle of non-aggression, the Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from using force against an individual until it has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual has committed a crime in the past.

The Fourth Amendment goes even farther, prohibiting the government from even searching an individual or his papers (e.g., phone records, e-mails, etc.) without probable cause that the individual has committed a crime in the past.

The entire Bill of Rights supposes that you are beyond the reach of government until you have actually committed a crime. That logically excludes the possibility of the government preventing anything, because the government must employ force against the innocent to do so.

Read the rest of the article at Communities Digital News…

Why Civil Libertarians Should Oppose Federal Civil Rights Charges in Kelly Thomas Case

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On Monday, a jury acquitted Officers Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli of charges related to the death of Kelly Thomas. Immediately afterwards, the FBI field office in Los Angeles announced that it would review the case to determine if federal charges would be brought against the officers.

The verdict was unpopular with civil libertarians, who cited the case as evidence of increasing police brutality, the result of a militarization trend in state and local police departments. They had hoped a guilty verdict would establish some accountability for officers who abuse their power.

They were correct to call attention to the case, but they should oppose federal charges against Ramos and Cicinelli. Affirming the authority of multiple governments to charge defendants with crimes for the same behavior loses the forest for the trees. While a conviction in federal court may feel good in this case, it further empowers the federal government to encroach upon state jurisdiction and weakens due process rights for defendants in general.

Read the rest of the article on The Huffington Post…

$1.1 trillion budget deal doesn’t change fiscal cliff

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Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

TAMPA, January 15, 2014 – The Associated Press reported today that Republicans and Democrats are ready to support a $1.1 trillion spending bill that would fund the federal government through its current fiscal year, which ends September 30, 2014. Citing a perceived mandate from voters to put aside their differences, Congress largely abandoned the superficial cuts remaining from sequestration.

Those widely reported “cuts” weren’t really decreases in spending. They were merely promises to increase spending less than planned.

Out in the real world, when an employee making $18.00 per hour gets a 5% pay cut, his new hourly wage is $17.10. That’s not how it works in Washington, D.C. When a federal program funded at $3 billion in 2013 is “cut,” it’s funded for $3.1 billion in 2014 instead of $3.2 billion.

What have been called “draconian cuts” and “gutting the military” by hysterical politicians and media are, for the most part, increases in spending that beneficiaries deem inadequate. Now, even that infinitesimal restraint is gone.

Depending upon which poll one cites and the wording of the questions in it, there is some evidence that the public was unhappy with last autumn’s government shutdown and desires more “bipartisanship” in Congress. Representatives on both sides of the aisle were eager to comply in an election year.

“There’s a desire to show people we can do our job,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho.

However, no poll attempts to separate net taxpayers from net tax collectors. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the latter group would be unhappy with any interruption in government spending. A poll exclusively querying the former group may have yielded far different results.

Regardless of how any part of the public feels about federal spending, it is going to be cut dramatically. The fiscal realities that prompted sequestration and the shutdown have not gone away. Playing nice in Congress hasn’t changed that.

The federal government can only service its $16 trillion debt while its interest rate remains artificially low. The Federal Reserve has attempted to keep it near zero since 2008. It has only been successful because other buyers of federal debt have continued to buy while the Fed has pumped liquidity into the economy with its own purchases.

Should China, the Fed or any other buyer of federal debt cease or even significantly decrease its purchases, interest rates will begin to rise.

When interest rates rise on home mortgages, it hurts. When interest rates rise on $16 trillion, chaos ensues.

According to the White House’s fiscal year 2014 Budget proposal, interest in fiscal year 2013 was $220 billion or 6.2% of all federal spending. That was with interest rates below one half of one percent. It doesn’t take a Nobel Laureate to imagine what happens if the rate begins creeping up to the modest 3-6% levels of the last decade, much less the double digit rates accompanying the crises of the late 1970’s and early 80’s. Annual interest due on federal debt would increase hundreds of millions of dollars.

That would amount to de facto cuts in federal spending on everything else. We’re not talking about make believe “cuts” where spending is still more than the year before. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars less available to spend than the year before. We’re talking about cuts.

Increasing tax revenues isn’t the answer because taxes revenues are already maxed out. The only real debate left on tax rates is whether the top rate on the wealthiest should be 33% or 39%, which is inconsequential to the debt problem. If tax rates are raised significantly overall, revenues go down. That’s already been proven.

So, the federal government tiptoes forward on a fiscal tightrope, dependent upon a set of artificially-created conditions that could change at any time. An overpriced stock market could crash on its own. China could decide to cease or decrease its debt purchases. A natural disaster could occur. Any of these could start the dominoes falling towards higher interest rates, recession for the economy and an unserviceable federal debt.

Even if none of the above occur, the end is inevitable. If printing money to buy your own debt were sustainable, the government could legalize counterfeiting and everyone would be rich. Sooner or later, economic reality will assert itself and the United States will be forced to consume less than it produces. The only question on federal spending is whether it will decrease due to a deliberate act of Congress or the way Greece’s did.

The current budget deal may provide an answer.

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Fast food and retail employees are capitalists, too

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TAMPA, January 6, 2014 – It’s startling how pervasive Karl Marx’s worldview has become, even here in the supposed home of capitalism. Economists since Adam Smith have represented the division of labor with names for the different roles played by individuals within it at any given time.

But it was Marx who identified “capitalists” as vampires sucking the blood of victim workers. He didn’t use labels such as capitalist and worker merely to explain economic roles, but identified them as separate classes in a political struggle.

Without even realizing it, even pro-market Americans accept these assumptions and largely base their arguments upon them. When the debate devolves into one in which low income earners claim an entitlement to higher wages and high income earners respond by telling them why they don’t deserve higher wages, Marx has already won.

There is no difference between capitalists and workers. All workers are capitalists, even those currently making minimum wage in the fast food or retail industries.

Somehow, the employment contract has assumed a Romulan cloaking device that prevents people from seeing it for what it is. The employment contract is a buyer-seller exchange, like any other. Employees sell a product to employers at a mutually agreed upon price.

That the employer will use that product to make another and then sell it is not substantively different from a manufacturer buying a tire or a bearing and using it to manufacture a bicycle. This is not to say that human beings in an employment agreement have no more worth than a tire or a bearing. Rather, they are fulfilling the same economic function in a complex production process as the manufacturer of the tire or the bearing.

Employees produce the product they sell to employers themselves. Therefore, they must have capital, i.e. “the means of production.” It is their minds and bodies, with which they produce the products called fast food grill services, or cashier services, or shelf stocking services. They sell these products to the highest bidder, the employer willing to pay the most in cash and benefits in exchange for the products they offer.

Employees at a fast food establishment don’t make lower wages than doctors or engineers because they are less educated, less skilled or part of some imaginary “class.” They make lower wages, i.e., are forced to sell their product at a lower price because the product they produce is less scarce than that produced by doctors and engineers.

There is no question of justice or injustice, social or otherwise. It’s simple supply and demand. The supply of capitalists who can produce fast food grill services is far greater than the supply of capitalists who can produce doctor or engineer services.

Like all exchanges in a free market, the exchange between the capitalists commonly known as “employees” and those known as “employers” should be voluntary. Minimum wage laws destroy the voluntary nature of these exchanges for both parties. It prohibits employers from buying services at the market price and prohibits employees from selling services at the market price.

It turns employees into “crony capitalists,” just like the corporate recipients of farm subsidies or the beneficiaries of favorable regulation. Government intervention allows them to charge higher prices than they could in a free market and insulates them from the competition of people willing to sell the same product at a lower price.

Ultimately, it results in higher prices for consumer goods, which affects everyone, including the employees it purports to help.

Raising the minimum wage raises the cost of production. As capital is finite, that means that less overall goods and services will be produced. Scarcer goods and services mean higher prices. Higher prices lower real wages.

So, unlike the higher standard of living corporate crony capitalists realize through government intervention, employee crony capitalists realize a lower one. Raising the minimum wage also gives politicians cover for all sorts of other interventions, none of which are designed to improve the lives of fast food employees.

During the 19^th century, wages increased modestly at the market rate, but vast increases in production made consumer goods more abundant and thus cheaper. Real wages skyrocketed, as average income earners could buy almost twice the amount of goods and services with each dollar by the end of that century.

There was also a gold standard that prevented the inflation we have today, but that is another story.

Minimum wage laws destroy the cause and effect relationships that result in higher production, lower prices and ultimately a higher standard of living for everyone. Lower consumer good prices benefit low income earners much more than high income earners. High income earners can afford a 20% increase in the price of a pound of hamburger or a gallon of gas.

Not once in all of history have low income earners been better off after listening to the demagogues. They won’t be this time, either.

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

It’s not affordable and Obama doesn’t care

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TAMPA, January 3, 2014 – Two days ago, Americans rang in the first New Year in its history in which they were required to buy a private company’s product, regardless of their wishes. Predictably, the bloom was already off the rose, even for supporters of this debacle.

The reality that the Affordable Care Act will make insurance premiums go up and eliminate existing health plans whether members liked them or not had already set in. As for those 45 million uninsured we heard so much about four years ago, 44 million of them presumably remain uninsured under the ACA. That the website can’t handle the traffic is likely providing cover for millions of Americans who just aren’t interested in complying.

The lion’s share of blame has been focused on President Obama, but that is really counterproductive. Despite his name being forever attached to “Obamacare,” Obama really had little to do with creating it. He didn’t write the bill. He probably hasn’t even read it.

President Obama’s role in Obamacare was to use the “bully pulpit” of the Oval Office to pitch a tired, old and previously rejected idea that suddenly had new life because of a financial crisis that was largely blamed on the Republican Party, fairly or not.

So where did it come from? The snap answer would be Democrats, who passed the bill without a single Republican vote. That’s good politics for the Republicans, but only because Americans have an extremely short memory.

Even Romneycare in Massachusetts was not the genesis of Obamacare. The individual mandate, subsidies for low income earners and most other attributes of Obamacare were all part of the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, introduced by Republican U.S. Senator John Conyers and supported by fellow Republicans Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennet and Kit Bond, among others.

Bennet would go on in 2007 to join Democrat Ron Wyden in introducing the Healthy Americans Act, which also featured an individual mandate and “State Help Agencies,” now called “health care exchanges” or “health care marketplaces.”

That Republicans used to introduce this horrible program as an alternative to the even worse single payer proposal by Democrats is no excuse. It is precisely the tyrannical, economically obtuse and grossly unfair program that Republicans have described it as for the past four years – after promoting it for the previous twenty.

It goes to show that given a long enough stay in Washington, D.C., anyone will begin to see govenrment as the only answer to any problem, most of which are created by government in the first place.

More importantly, debacles like Obamacare are rarely the result of presidential elections. Presidents like FDR, LBJ and Obama merely become the face associated with laws that finally pass after resistance has been worn down over decades.

James Madison’s words from the Federalist are instructive:

“But in a representative republic, where the executive magistracy is carefully limited; both in the extent and the duration of its power; and where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly, which is inspired, by a supposed influence over the people, with an intrepid confidence in its own strength; which is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions which actuate a multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of pursuing the objects of its passions, by means which reason prescribes; it is against the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions.”

Despite the many usurpations of power by the executive branch, it is still “the enterprising ambition” of Congress that causes most of the misery government continues to spread. Given enough time, they will impose their boondoggles, no matter how unwise and unpopular they are.

There are over 100 members of the House of Representatives that have sat in those seats since at least the 1990’s. There are almost 30 members of similar longevity in the Senate.

Who knows what they’ll drag out of the dustbin next? It’s time for voters to do a little sweeping of their own. The letters after representatives’ names should make little difference.

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Duck Dynasty A&E dispute proves Civil Rights Act obsolete

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TAMPA, December 20, 2013 – Immediately after A&E put Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson “on hiatus,” the blogosphere exploded with reactions. Liberals decry Robertson’s alleged bigotry. Conservatives defended his right to free speech and freedom of religion.

99% of the commentary is wrong, of course. First, Robertson’s comments were not bigoted. Robertson merely quotes the Bible on homosexuality. He then says that it is not for humans to judge anyone. That is reserved for God.

You can’t be prejudiced if you don’t judge. He believes homosexuality is a sin, but nowhere does he indicate that anyone should be treated differently, either by the law or by individuals, because they are homosexual.

This has nothing to do with freedom of speech or religion, either. Those principles relate to government suppression of speech and religion. The government hasn’t threatened Robertson.

In fact, A&E’s response was the textbook libertarian answer to this kind of dispute. A&E’s management, representing the stockholders, exercised their own right to freedom of association. They have a right to terminate their business relationship with Robertson for any reason, provided it does not violate the contract they signed with him.

The other cast members have now released a statement implying they won’t do the show without Phil. The statement indicates that they are negotiating with A&E on what the future of the show may be.

It’s possible that the show will be canceled. Or, A&E might back down. Most likely, a compromise will be reached where the show goes on, Phil Robertson makes a public statement expressing regret for offending anyone, but standing by his Christian faith, and A&E welcomes him back on condition he doesn’t make public statements on this subject in the future.

Does anyone notice anything missing from these scenarios?

If you said “the government,” you’re correct. If this little media drama has proven anything so far, it is how unnecessary government is in resolving issues of racism or bigotry. The market does just fine.

It would do better if Titles II and VII of the Civil Rights Act were repealed.

Most of the Act prohibited discrimination based upon race, color, religion or national origin in either state or federal governments. There are legitimate constitutional concerns about giving the federal government these powers over the states, but even most libertarians aren’t losing much sleep. If ever there was a place to compromise strict constitutional principles, prohibiting bigotry in government is it.

Titles II and VII of the Act are another story. In those, the federal government is given power over the personal choices of the individual. Title II prohibited private business owners from discriminating in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and “all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce.” Title VII prohibited employers from so discriminating.

This redefined the very idea of private property. No longer could individuals “dispose of their persons or possessions as they saw fit,” as Locke would put it. In effect, the government made itself part owner of all private property.

One does not have to be a racist or a bigot to be concerned. The response at the time was that American culture was so deeply ingrained with prejudice, especially towards blacks, that only the government’s heavy hand could solve the problem.

There are certainly cracks in that theory. For example, if there weren’t private business owners in the south who wanted to serve blacks, then why did they have to make it illegal to do so?

Questions only libertarians think to ask.

In any case, this is 2013, not 1964. The power given to the federal government isn’t necessary now, if it ever was. The Duck Dynasty incident proves that. Voluntary contracts will resolve that dispute and consumers will reward or punish that resolution with their decisions to watch or boycott.

Like all government solutions, the Civil Rights Act has largely achieved results opposite of its intentions. Affirmative Action spawns resentment against blacks when they get jobs because of their race over more qualified applicants. There is also resentment when the black is more qualified, because the white applicant quite reasonably suspects that race was a factor, even when it wasn’t.

Check black unemployment statistics during the fifty years before and after the Act was passed. The government has defeated black unemployment about as well as it’s made health care more affordable.

The market, if left free, would be an efficient dispatcher of racism. Employers who routinely hired less qualified employees based upon their race would soon find themselves outperformed by firms that hired purely based upon ability. In business terms, racism would be rendered extinct.

The same would hold for hotels, restaurants and other private firms that serve the public, in terms of their decisions of which customers to serve.

Not convinced? Here is a wager. Repeal Titles II and VII of the Civil Rights Act and allow individuals to make personal decisions based upon whatever values they hold. In the unlikely event that someone puts up a “Whites Only” sign on a restaurant, this writer – likely the worst restaurateur on the planet – will open for business across the street the very next week. My sign will say “Everybody Welcome.”

We’ll see who is still in business a month after that.

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

What Bible is Pope Francis reading?

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TAMPA, December 18, 2013 – There has already been a lot said about Pope Francis’ EVANGELII GAUDIUM, in which he is critical of free markets. Reactions by Christian proponents of capitalism have ranged from respectful disagreement to full-on denial that he was critical of the market at all.

The latter group is not facing reality. While having since clarified that he is not Marxist, the pope clearly rejected the laissez faire approach to the market in favor of the highly regulated, redistributionist model promoted by the left. His offering is chock full of the usual sophisms leftists use to justify overriding freedom of choice in exchanges of property.

There is no need to address each of the pope’s arguments against free markets from a purely economic perspective. Tom Woods has already done this thoroughly during his December 6 episode of the Tom Woods Show, “Pope Francis on Capitalism.”

What is more surprising than the pope’s leftist economic ideas is his ability to ignore the overtly pro-capitalist themes in the gospels themselves. Jesus’ teaching consistently holds capitalists up as heroes. He never once even hints that the government should direct economic affairs.

The misconception that Jesus’ message is anti-capitalist probably stems from the same confusion that pervades all leftist thinking: the inability to distinguish voluntary from coerced human action. Jesus often exhorts his followers to voluntarily give to the poor. Nowhere in the gospels does he suggest that the Romans or the vassal Jewish government should be empowered to tax the wealthy to provide for the poor.

Tax collectors are de facto sinners, remember?

Jesus also warns against the temptations that great wealth may expose one to. Being consumed with accumulating wealth to the exclusion of all other concerns leaves no room for devotion to God or charity to one’s fellow man. This is summed up in Luke 16:13 when Jesus says,

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

Again, Jesus charges his followers to manage their own passion for wealth. There is no suggestion that the government should be involved.

Jesus doesn’t expound on political economy because, as he told Pilate, “my kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36). However, his parables have consistently pro-capitalist themes.

In the parable of the bags of gold (Matthew 25: 14-30), the servants who choose to be capitalists with the master’s money are richly rewarded upon the master’s return. The servant who chose not to be a capitalist is not only not rewarded, he is “cast into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth!”

Certainly, the story is symbolic. The money in the story represents the abilities given to each individual by God. But even on that level the story does not support the anti-capitalists. First, the master, the ultimate capitalist in the parable, actually represents God. Certainly, Jesus would have found another way to make his point if capitalists were de facto sinners (like tax collectors).

Notice also that the servant who chooses not to invest the master’s money is the one given the least. Symbolically, he represents the person who has the least natural gifts or who is born to disadvantage. Does Jesus suggest that the other two servants should be taxed to help him? No. The most disadvantaged servant is expected to do the best with what he has. He isn’t punished because he achieves less. He is punished because he fails to try.

In two other parables, Jesus represents God as the owner of a vineyard. In Matthew 20: 1-16, he makes the point that it is never too late for salvation and that a repentant man can claim the same salvation as one who has been devout all of his life. He represents salvation as wages paid to laborers. When a laborer who worked longer complains that he is paid no more than one who only worked an hour, the master replies,

“Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee.”

Again, the message is spiritual, but Jesus uses the very libertarian, capitalist idea that no one is entitled to any more wages than both parties voluntarily agree to.

God is again depicted as the owner of a vineyard in Matthew 21: 33-41. In this parable, the vineyard owner is even more overtly capitalist. Verse 33 in particular highlights that it is the previous work of the owner in planting the vineyard, hedging around it, and building a tower that makes the land productive before it is ever rented out to the husbandmen.

In other words, the capitalist has sacrificed his own consumption in the present to invest in land and capital goods to improve the productivity of the land. This has created an opportunity for the husbandmen to be more productive by working on the owner’s land than they would be on their own, without the land or the capital goods the owner has provided.

The owner then enters a voluntary agreement with the husbandmen whereby each party keeps part of what is produced. Both owner and husbandmen benefit from the agreement. The owner is entitled to the profits because he is the one who created the opportunity by sacrificing his own consumption in the past.

The husbandmen are evil specifically because they act like Marxists and renege on the agreement. They kill the owner’s agents and even his son, hoping to seize all of the wealth for themselves.

In verse 41, Jesus teaches that the owner will destroy the Marxists and rent the land to other husbandmen who will make him profits. The right of the owner to profits is affirmed, the idea that the workers are being exploited or should be able to take more than the owner has agreed to pay them is completely absent.

Nowhere in any of these parables are socialist ideas advanced. On the contrary, God is consistently represented as a capitalist and his children judged by how profitable they are to Him.

While the purpose of the parables is to teach a spiritual lesson, these are not the literary tools that an anti-capitalist author would employ. Jesus’ pro-capitalist bias couldn’t hit one over the head any harder, prompting the question:

What Bible is Pope Francis reading?

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Mr. Obama, tear down this data center

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Get the tee shirt here!

TAMPA, December 17, 2013 – A federal judge’s ruling Monday confirmed what a majority of Americans already knew. The National Security Agency’s indiscriminate gathering of data on every phone call made in the United States is unconstitutional. Calling the government’s data gathering technology “almost Orwellian,” Judge Richard Leon said that James Madison would be “aghast” if he knew the government was encroaching upon liberty in such a way.

According to USA Today, he also pointed out another thing most Americans already knew. The program never has and likely never will prevent a terrorist attack.

“Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation — most notably the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics — I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism,” the judge said.

The judge limited his ruling to the plaintiffs in the case, leaving constitutionality open for other courts to decide in other cases. The ruling is expected to be the first of many, with an expectation that the issue may eventually find its way into the Supreme Court.

Then, it’s “rights roulette” as Americans sit on the edge of their seats wondering if the government’s black-robed high priests will pronounce away more of their freedom.

It doesn’t have to come down to that. President Obama could take matters into his own hands and actually be acting within the constitutional limits of his power for a change. The president could order the NSA to cease its program, citing the federal judge’s ruling as his authority.

The president is charged to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed” by Article II Section 3 of the Constitution. That includes the laws against murder and terrorism. But the constitution doesn’t tell him how to perform that duty. It does prohibit him from doing so in a way that would violate his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

A federal judge just ruled he is doing precisely that.

The president’s legacy is in serious jeopardy. He is already accused of lying to the America people, repeatedly for years, about the legislation that informally bears his name. Controversy over his administration’s handling of the Benghazi incident persists.

Despite Pollyanna assurances to the contrary, the U.S. economy remains in a depression, complete with double digit unemployment rates and Hoovervilles. Deciding not to count millions of able-bodied Americans who aren’t working and ignoring formerly middle class people living in tents under bridges doesn’t change that.

However, none of this will damage Obama’s legacy in the long term. As I’ve said before, history will not be concerned with health care programs or unemployment rates. It will be concerned with who attacked the fundamental principles of freedom and who risked everything to defend them.

President Obama campaigned against Bush era civil liberties violations in 2008. He denounced torture and promised to close Guantanamo Bay. It remains open.

He condemned the very domestic spying programs at issue here when run by the Bush administration, then sent his lawyers into court seeking legal justification to expand them even further. His administration has built a massive data center in Utah to store the ill-gotten information for as long as the government sees fit.

In an October 7, 2013 article, Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal called the data center “a symbol of the spy agency’s surveillance prowess.”

Warrantless government surveillance of its own citizens. Concentration camps where U.S. citizens could be tortured. Killing U.S. citizens without due process. This is the stuff legacies are made of.

The Alien and Sedition Acts still haunt John Adams’ legacy more than two centuries after his presidency. However, Adams’ other achievements in promoting liberty and peace overshadow them, including sacrificing a second term as president to prevent a disastrous war with France.

The Obama administration has accomplished nothing comparable. It continues to take a hard line against the whistleblower Edward Snowden who exposed the activity that a federal judge has now said violates the Constitution the president swore to defend. It has completed construction on a massive edifice dedicated to trampling the Fourth Amendment.

Unless he changes course now, this is what the president will be remembered for.

Mr. Obama, tear down this data center.

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.