A better question is: How much government do the American people need? We need our defense forces to protect us from our enemies. We need policemen to protect us against criminals. We need a court system to prosecute criminals and adjudicate disputes among us. Taxes are required to pay for all of these legitimate government functions, and if that’s all we needed and wanted, taxes would be extremely low.

The year 2011 marks the 123rd year since the publication of Edward Bellamy’s famous utopian novel, Looking Backward, in which the author depicted a happy, socialist America in the year 2000. In Bellamy’s optimistic fantasy, greed and material want ceased to exist, brotherly harmony prevailed, the arts and sciences flourished, and an all-powerful and pervasive government and bureaucracy were efficient and fair.

Sacred holidays celebrated by the two major Biblical religions, Passover and Easter, take place usually within days of each other in March and April. In the year 2011 they are quite close. The Jewish week-long celebration of Passover began at sundown, Tuesday, April 19th, two days after Christian Palm Sunday. Good Friday takes place on April 22nd and Easter Sunday on April 24th.

Recently, a friend of mine, an antiquarian book dealer, bought a box of early 19th century pamphlets at a book auction, among which was an 1828 catalogue of Dartmouth College. I had an opportunity to examine this fragile 24-page catalogue and was quite intrigued by the Course of Study students were required to take in those days.

Those of us — of Tom Brokaw’s greatest generation — who attended the public schools in the 1930s and '40s remember our classrooms as quite barren, immaculately clean, quiet and orderly. There was a portrait of George Washington on the wall, and cursive letters were on a printed strip across the top of the blackboard. That was it. No fancy posters.

One of the ways the Federal Government can significantly cut its 13 trillion-dollar debt is by selling some of 635 million acres of land it owns in the United States. Believe it or not, Washington owns three out of every 10 acres of land in the country. Yet, the Obama administration wants to buy more. It wants Congress to allocate $900 million in new spending in 2012 to increase its ownership of U.S. land.

On June 27, 1993, there appeared in the London Telegraph a lengthy article about Britain’s secret education establishment. It was revealed that since 1941 this shadowy association, known as the All-Souls Group and representing some of the most powerful people in the world of British education, has been meeting three times a year in an oak-paneled room at Oxford University. The article stated:

Class warfare, as we have been told by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and every other socialist and communist, is inherent in capitalist society because of the conflict between management and labor, between the owners of corporations and their employees, between the workers and the bourgeoisie. And the only solution to this conflict is the peaceful or violent transfer of corporate ownership from the stockholders to the employees.

Back in November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts released an alarming report on the state of literacy in the United States, Reading at Risk. It was unusual for a liberal cultural entity created by the federal government to bring attention to an educational problem, but credit must be given to the Endowment chairman, Dana Gioia, for bringing this issue to the attention of the American people. He said: “This is a massive social problem. We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading.”

Taking advantage of the power displayed by the public employee unions in Wisconsin, socialist union leaders are planning a campaign to destroy capitalism by creating financial chaos. They consider capitalism to be in such a fragile and weakened condition, that a massive campaign aimed at creating financial chaos will bring the whole financial system crashing down.