As part of its ongoing covert war against Iran, the U.S. government has for years been providing training — some of it on American soil — and other material support to a State Department-designated “foreign terrorist organization,” the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), the New Yorker’s Seymour M. Hersh reports.

A Georgia kindergarten student was handcuffed and arrested for throwing a temper tantrum in school on Friday, Macon’s WMAZ-TV reports.

Six-year-old Salecia Johnson, a student at Creekside Elementary School in Milledgeville, allegedly knocked over a shelf, injuring the principal; bit the office door knob; jumped on the paper shredder; and tried to break a glass frame above the shredder.

On February 22, Jessie Sansone of Kitchener, Ontario, thought he was making a routine stop to pick up his children at the end of a school day. Instead, he found himself arrested, strip-searched, and thrown in jail. His wife was also taken into police custody, while his children were spirited away by child welfare agents.

Government programs often begin with limited, easily identifiable purposes, then grow over time to become expensive, wasteful, and even dangerous monstrosities. Such is the case with the federal War on Drugs, which began with little fanfare under a modest 1914 anti-narcotics law and has since grown to enormous proportions, eviscerating the Bill of Rights and entangling the United States in countries all around the globe in a futile effort to eradicate the supplies of highly sought-after commodities.

When it comes to private property, wrote economist Ludwig von Mises, it is a simple “either-or” proposition: “either private ownership of the means of production, or hunger and misery for everyone.” In 1959, Fidel Castro essentially abolished private property in Cuba, and the result has been exactly as Mises predicted: a declining standard of living and shortages of basic necessities such as food, building materials, and housing.

The good news: The President has kept his promises to cut the number of government employees drastically and to reduce regulations so that new small businesses can open up, leading to an almost immediate 50 percent increase in the number of self-employed persons. The bad news: That’s President Raul Castro of communist Cuba, not President Barack Obama of ostensibly capitalist America.

With the passage of ObamaCare, the United States has taken another fateful step down the road to fully socialized medicine, the ultimate goal of the American political class with regard to healthcare. Meanwhile, our neighbor to the north, which reached the end of that road over 40 years ago, is being forced by the laws of economics, which no government can repeal, to head in the opposite direction.

According to the Miami Herald, the Venezuelan government has introduced what socialist President Hugo Chavez is calling a “Good Life Card” to be used to purchase groceries at government-owned stores. Speaking to Venezuelans on the government’s television channel, Chavez explained, “It’s a card for you to purchase what you are going to take and they keep deducting. It’s to buy what you need, not to promote communism, but to buy what [sic] just what you need.”

American Christians may not see eye-to-eye on the justness or wisdom of their government’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but one thing on which they should be able to agree — because the facts are indisputable — is that the wars have been devastating for their coreligionists in those countries. Hundreds of thousands of Christians, including members of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, have either fled from or been killed in Iraq since 2003. Now, according to the U.S. State Department, the situation for Christians in Afghanistan has become so dire that not a single church remains in that country.

“I have read that Americans are peace-loving,” 58-year-old Pakistani writer Syed Zubair Ashraf told the Washington Post. “But their government has interfered in every country. Why?”

That is an excellent question, and one to which Americans ought to give serious consideration, especially as a presidential election approaches. Few Americans would consider themselves warlike. Who among us would choose to drop bombs on a foreign country at his own expense and risk? Yet the U.S. government, claiming to represent the American people, does so routinely — and then blames the inevitable retaliation on foreigners’ hatred of the United States’ liberty, not its government’s foreign policy.