So what can the government do to promote real job growth? Quite simply, get out of the way. We don’t need to teach the grass to grow; we just need to move the rocks off of it. The rocks weighing down on the economy are government rules and regulations — in other words, bureaucracy and overregulation.

According to the Small Business Administration, federal rules and regulations — from the Fair Labor Standards Act to the Polygraph Protection Act — cost small businesses $10,000 annually per employee in compliance costs. To put that in perspective: That would take a company with 10 employees from making a $100,000 profit to just breaking even.

Take away those rules and regulations and that firm could use those profits to hire another employee and reinvest the rest in the business (in raises or new office space, for example). With the bureaucracy in place, however, you might consider letting someone go in the current business environment.

The mere threat of new regulation — from the EPA’s new emissions regulations to the simple requirement to provide “free” birth control in health insurance plans — is enough to force any prudent business manager to think again about hiring new staff or even retaining all existing staff. The costs from new regulations are just as real as those from new taxes or restrictions on business.

Bureaucracy, literally, kills jobs. Therefore, it is vital that over the next few months legislators work to rein in the size of government. But they should not only focus on spending; they should rein in bureaucracy as well. A good place to start would be by pruning back some of the more egregious regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

Moreover, reining in excessive regulation can kill two birds with one stone, as it would provide real benefits in terms of government revenue, as increased economic activity leads to greater tax receipts.

For example, allowing more companies to mine vitally needed rare minerals on federal lands will increase not only corporate tax revenues, but also bring in revenues from lease payments and the like. In turn, the miners employed at these facilities will have higher incomes, and will spend more, stimulating local economies. Many people employed as a result will come off the unemployment lines, reducing government costs further.

That all sounds very good, but restraining the growth of government is easier said than done. So how do we get there? For some sound, practical ideas, we need only look across the Atlantic. The United Kingdom’s coalition government has adopted a plan for growth that includes the creation of dozens of “enterprise zones.” These zones have a reduced regulatory burden on businesses and three-year exemptions on all new regulations for “micro-businesses” — firms employing five or fewer people — and startups.

America successfully employed Enterprise Zones during the Reagan era and could do so again. One idea, for instance, might be to establish enterprise zones for mineral explorations on federal lands (with the appropriate environmental safeguards), putting those lands to work for their owners — the American people.

Such a growth agenda will be opposed by corporate welfare addicts who have turned to government rather than the consumer as their source of profits. They will lobby heavily to keep their subsidy programs and regulations that protect them from start-up competition. They will be joined in this effort by labor unions, for whom higher unemployment among non-members is fine as long as they can keep their privileges (and dues).

More than ever before, the current debate over the size of government pits powerful special interests against the people. Those special interests are invested in the status quo, and like the regulatory state and the income streams it generates just the way they are. Change won’t be easy. But if we reduce bureaucracy and move the rocks off the grass, the resulting growth will make future generations wonder why we ever walked down the road to regulatory serfdom as far as we did in the first place.

Iain Murray heads the Center for Economic Freedom at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His latest book is “Stealing You Blind: How Government Fatcats Are Getting Rich Off of You,” new from Regnery.

I am of course referring to classical liberalism, now tragically mistitled conservatism. The half-philosophy known as the Left co-opted that most precious word, liberty, then stopped reading at “withholds judgment.” And this anti-intellectual betrayal of humanity’s best idea has once again resulted in an unfathomably dangerous historical anomaly: an existential threat is flourishing, liberty and life are at stake, yet the ones we now call liberals refuse to pass judgment on the illiberal. They have access to enough logic and reason for a bombproof conclusion, yet they refuse to pass judgment.

Forbes’ 2009 survey of the world’s most dangerous countries is out, and the list is comprised almost entirely of Islamic-dominated lands. A second list, of the world’s active conflicts, is essentially a checklist of current Islamic aggression (and describes an entirely related point — the few non-Islamic conflicts have communist/socialist or other totalitarian participants). Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Pakistan, West Bank/Gaza Strip, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Algeria, Nigeria, Georgia — that’s Forbes‘ top 15.

The world’s current conflicts: an Islamic revolt in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq; an Islamic butchery in Sudan; an Islamic civil war in Somalia; an Islamist civil war in Sri Lanka; an Islamic invasion into Chad (perpetrated by the Sudanese butchers); an Islamic insurgency in Thailand; an Islamist insurgency across all of Northeast Africa (the Maghreb); an Islamic separatist movement in Kashmir; an Islamist insurgency in the Philippines; and a sustained Islamic belligerency against Israel involving Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

Besides those, the Earth is pained with a few conflicts involving Islamic, Communist, and other totalitarian movements, most of which are among the long-simmering variety and primarily feature constant human rights abuses rather than open war.

And that’s it. That’s all of the fighting.

Human rights? Women’s rights? Islamic states — including the supposed moderates such as Jordan — take up virtually the entire list of worst offenders, along with a few other Communist/totalitarian regimes.

Rationalism, fairness, the death of tribalist fears, the emergence from tyranny and the plumb line from there to intellectual accomplishment — it all seeds from the invention and military defense of the liberal. Presented with this evidence, the classical liberal is required to withhold judgment until finding an answer bulletproofed by logic and reason. This behavior is undeniably what the classical liberals among us have done — admirably — since 9/11.

First, we withheld judgment on the religion of the attackers. President Bush stood on rubble and promised “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” But he also stated, again and again, that we are not at war with Islam, simply with a perverted form of the great religion. It was a subjective, anti-intellectual conclusion. It was not based on reason, and the correct response regarding liberalism’s stance toward Islam should have been: “We have not reached an answer yet.”

The Left took a similar stance, if only initially — they withheld judgment on the religion of the attackers but then chose to blame Western policy towards Islamic lands for motivating the terrorists. Subjective is not a descriptive enough word for this.  Essentially, that was the end of the Left’s investigation — which, stunningly, is exactly what Leftism required.

Technically, the Left preaches that the most enlightened human behavior is to withhold judgment in favor of first concluding a thorough self-examination. But that self-examination process — the perfecting of America and the West prior to judging another culture — can never conclude. There will always be a poor decision, a misguided decision, or a failed policy enacted by democratically elected officials. A Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.

Our country is run by a marketplace of ideas. Some will win support and be proven right and some will win support and be proven wrong. Representatives will be voted in and out, the future will always remain unknown, and our leaders will continually take risks with our direction. So withholding judgment in favor of a thorough self-examination becomes a fraud, a half-measure. It becomes a permanently withheld judgment, which is no approach at all. Just a worthless, subjective, illogical philosophy of government, a perennial invocation of “this sentence is false,” to the point that a definable Leftist international policy does not, in fact, exist.

The non-Left liberals? Those with any connection to the beliefs of the classical liberal have spent the past decade asking the questions they are required to ask:

• Do societies ever turn to terroristic, totalitarian behavior solely because of outside oppression, or do the movements arise from within?
• Is Islam as it is practiced by terrorists and aggressive Islamic countries a new phenomenon? Or does it predate contact with the West?
• Is it possible for one religion/culture to be more worthwhile to humanity as a whole than another?
• Is it racist to think Islam is inherently violent?

These questions researched, the next step was to thoroughly examine the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sira, and the accepted interpretations of such by Islamic scholars and leaders.

• Quite simply, what was Mohammad’s life like? How does it compare, objectively, to other prominent religious figures? How did subsequent Islamic leaders interpret Mohammad’s teachings, and — most importantly — how did they act in response? If Islam as interpreted by the terrorists is not true Islam, what is the strain of moderate Islam called? Who are its leaders and its followers? What is their literature? Where is it practiced?

Almost eight years following 9/11, eight years to address these questions, and I am hard-pressed to find any sort of sizable Leftist group of voters who know a bloody thing about the contents of the Koran.

The classical liberals? We’ve done what was required of us in the name of defending liberty. Feel free to challenge our bulletproofed conclusion, but we promise your failure:

If the terrorists misinterpret Islam, then so does Mohammad.

The evidence concerning Islam is as much logic and reason as any government can ever hope to get regarding an international crisis. As an Islamic leader chases the bomb, we do not intend to wait for the illiberal, unreasoned, irrational half-thinkers of the left to simply ask a proper question.

Because they never will.

From Pajamas Media @2009

And it’s all because of those nasty conservative Tea Party Republicans.

Bernie Goldberg of "Bias"

The same liberal journalists who won’t call a real terrorist a terrorist can’t go 10 seconds without calling conservative Republicans terrorists. Or “Wahhabis,” as Chris Mathews described them on MSNBC.

Or “Hezbollah,” as Tom Friedman described them in the New York Times. Read the rest here

If the government fails to raise the ceiling, the worst-case scenario is a cold-turkey balanced budget, not a default.

The government borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends, which still leaves the 60 cents of revenue coming in—enough to pay the government’s mandatory bills (including entitlements and the interest payments on the debt).

This scenario isn’t pretty. The government’s discretionary operations would stop, and in order to fund defense, the government might have to partially pay for entitlements through the two trust funds and get some help from the Federal Reserve.

But still, the government will never default unless Geithner and the Obama Administration decide not to use the $2.2 trillion of annual revenue to pay our most important bills.

America faces a financial cliff, but that cliff isn’t from the debt ceiling. It’s from the debt itself. The Obama Administration must stop using scare tactics to force their big-government agenda down the throats of the American people.

Not only has this administration said we face this faux cliff in the debt ceiling, they’ve also implied that conservatives want to push Granny of a cliff by cutting entitlement programs. Considering no serious plan cuts benefits for those over 55, this is another fanciful, faux cliff.

America’s youth face the only real financial cliff in this debate.

The debt is all but literally dragging my generation off a cliff. At $14.3 Trillion, the US national debt would weigh approximately 315 million pounds in 100 dollar bills—the equivalent weight of 32 million golf balls or 600 Air Force Ones.

Those are some heavy shackles. In more graspable terms, by 2020 the interest payments on the debt alone will equal around $5500 per taxpayer. Paying this interest, not even the principle, on our nation’s credit card will result in a big enough tax increase to severely damage our economy in the coming decade.

Failure to enact serious entitlement reform will doom my generation to fiscal servitude to the government.

Everyone except for the far left and the White House realizes that Medicare and the other entitlements are the largest drivers of our debt. While defense and discretionary spending can certainly be rolled back, entitlements and interest payments will consume all projected revenue in a little over 10 years.

At this rate, my generation will never see a dime of Social Security or Medicare. Yet, we’ll still be saddled with the yoke of the ever-growing national debt which financed these programs for older generations.

Age supposedly brings long-term insight, but at age 21, I would rather see our government go cold turkey for a couple weeks to figure a real solution to this debt problem than to keep spending my generation into future oblivion.

Ideally, our leaders will come up with a solution before we hit the debt ceiling, but if not, the worst thing that happens is a temporary shutdown for some of Washington’s bureaucracies. It won’t be the end of the world.

In fact, Geithner’s theory that the global markets will collapse from a partial US government shutdown is ludicrous. The last time the US government had shutdowns in 1995 and 1996, the Dow and S&P 500 went up both times.

Precipitously (and temporarily) cutting spending to balanced levels will inevitably sting, but Americans should ask ourselves: How did we get fooled into fearing a balanced budget?

It’s time for the Obama Administration to act like adults and protect America’s younger generations. Instead of threatening a fake financial Armageddon, our government needs to look out for all of America’s vulnerable populations, including young people.

Hey, with the U. S. national debt increasing by $4.1 billion each day, we are faced with national bankruptcy—which has aroused the Republicans from their lethargy. They will agree to raise the debt ceiling if the politicians will agree to restrain their spending appetite by making specific cuts.

Cut What? Nothing!