The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, by Jason Vuic, an assistant professor of history at Bridgewater College in Virginia, deftly describes yet another episode in the history of the fiascos that occur when governments enable political entrepreneurs.

What can one say about the Yugo? It started out as one of the hottest items in U.S. automotive history, only to become the butt of jokes such as:

Q: How do you double the value of a Yugo?

A: Fill it up with gas.

Interestingly, the very reason the Yugo even became an item was a U.S. government move to keep small Japanese cars out of the United States. The Japanese automakers responded to this protectionism by making mid-sized luxury cars, which created a void for a small, inexpensive vehicle. The Yugo would (at least temporarily) fill that void thanks to the foresight of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin.

Austrian economists such as Israel Kirzner point out that entrepreneurs first see an opportunity and then they act. Bricklin, who is described as a “habitual entrepreneur,” decided that American consumers wanted small cars, and he knew just the company to build them—Zastava, a State-owned firm in Yugoslavia.

Bricklin is always looking for business opportunities, but he likes shortcuts. These invariably land him in trouble and ultimately bankruptcy. Despite having already pushed several failed ventures, Bricklin kept going, proving the wisdom of P. T. Barnum’s declaration that “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

So how is it that the guy who had conned investors in a scheme to fund Handyman America stores (which went bankrupt in 1965) and managed nearly to kill the one good company he founded (Subaru America—and, yes, I drive a Subaru) could find people willing to fund the Yugo venture? Enter the politics of the Cold War.

As Vuic notes, Yugoslavia, a communist/socialist country with “non-aligned” status, was a “buffer” between East and West. The U.S. government aggressively cultivated its relationship with that country, which in normal political times might have gone almost unnoticed. With the Cold War still in full bloom in the mid-1980s, and with Americans wanting cheap transportation, a marriage between the U.S. market and a company making inferior cars (Zastava used an old Fiat plant it had purchased) was consummated. All it took were the efforts of the failed entrepreneur Bricklin and Washington fixers like Lawrence Eagleburger, a former official in Ronald Reagan’s State Department, then working for Kissinger Associates.

U.S. operations opened in 1985, and the car was a huge success. Yugo mania was in full swing, as people crowded the lucky dealerships and waited for months for delivery of their spanking new Yugos.

But trouble soon began. The Yugo, for all of Bricklin’s hype, still was true to its socialist, Eastern European roots. While it wasn’t as terrible as a Wartburg or a Trabant, no one was trying to market those glorified East German lawnmowers in the United States as a “smart” choice. Once people began to drive Yugos they came to realize that communist quality control meant that the workers had proper political attitudes, not that they could build a decent car. Demand plunged as drivers learned about the car’s pathetic quality. In less than a decade Yugo America was bankrupt, as was Bricklin once again. Eventually the Yugo enjoyed a second career—as pop art.

Even though Vuic is not an economist, his well-written and entertaining book sheds a great deal of light on the larger issues of State planning, economic calculation, and every other argument that Austrians have been making against socialism and crony capitalism for the past 90 years. The next time you hear someone talking about the wonderful future for some proposed government-business partnership, remember the Yugo.

This case is about upholding one of the most fundamental principles in our system of justice — the obligation of every witness to provide truthful and direct testimony in judicial proceedings. In the United States, taking an oath and promising to testify truthfully is a serious matter. We cannot ignore those who choose instead to obstruct justice.

The Times might have pointed out that prosecutors regularly and deliberately withhold exculpatory evidence, yet I cannot find in any recent example in which a government employee was indicated, let alone tried, for obstruction of justice. So the notion that the government cannot ignore regular people’s alleged obstruction justice is a joke, but it’s on those of us who are not employed in the government’s “justice” system.

Race Issue

At least one commentator focused on race rather than government conduct. Times sports columnist William Rhoden claims to understand why Bonds was prosecuted:

The trial of Barry Bonds has always been more than a simple case of pursuing a bad guy and proving that he lied. The chase and the subsequent trial have been as much about a baseball era driven by vanity and greed, and fueled by performance-enhancing drugs.

But the eight-year pursuit of Bonds also reflects America’s discomfort with prominent, powerful, wealthy black men.

Ironically Rhoden’s employer helped drive the prosecution, and it along with media outfits like Sports Illustrated (SI) and ESPN enabled the police-state tactics used in the case. The dirty secret of the Bonds case is not steroids, but rather that journalists teamed with government agents to pursue Bonds. Furthermore, we will experience déjà vu as these same forces join to destroy the great cyclist Lance Armstrong.

The Bonds case was the brainchild of IRS agent Jeff Novitsky, who illegally searched Bonds’s garbage and was the main source for former Times reporter and columnist Selena Roberts, who now is at SI. (Duff Wilson, of the Times, who disgraced himself in coverage of the infamous Duke lacrosse case by propping up Mike Nifong long after his case fell apart, also was part of this coverage.)

Evidence Lacking

The government did not have laboratory evidence that Bonds took steroids (Bonds told a federal grand jury he had not taken them). Moreover, Greg Anderson, one of Bonds’s personal trainers and also a target of the feds, refused cooperate with the investigation. So, with the help of the Times and SI, federal authorities unleashed one attack after another on Anderson and his family. He was jailed three times for contempt of court, and his mother-in-law’s home was raided by 20 heavily armed agents in a tax investigation that Anderson’s attorney believes was retaliation for not testifying before a grand jury. (Earlier he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute steroids and money laundering, and was sentenced to three months in jail and three months at home.)

These Gestapo-style tactics worked. No mainstream news publication to my knowledge editorialized against this abuse of power. One columnist, Buzz Bissinger of the Daily Beast, called for the charges to be dropped, mincing no words against Novitsky, but even Bissinger failed to condemn some of the worst government actions against no-name people who had no strong media connections.

This silence is instructive. The New York Times published hundreds of attack articles condemning Augusta National Golf Club (which hosts the Master’s Tournament) for not having female members, but never questioned government tactics in the Bond and Armstrong cases. Sports Illustrated burnishes its “liberal” credentials, but salivates at information Novitsky supposedly gave Selena Roberts on the sly.

When I was in journalism school nearly 40 years ago, my professors solemnly told me that the media were the “watchdogs of government.” If the Bonds case tells us anything, it’s that the watchdogs are foxes guarding the henhouse. As for the rights of Barry Bonds, well, he was surly and a lousy interview, anyway.

So we have to introduce a number of things into our daily lives that will help us to “live green.” It all sounds good at the various rallies and “living green” meetings that are held regularly not only at our campus, but also at campuses all over the country. Students and others are told that they have to stop “wasting energy” and lower their “impact” by eating foods that pass political muster, and purchase goods that have the “sustainability” seal of approval.

What sounds good, however, often is not, and “sustainability” has become yet another scam – yes, scam – the statists have foisted on people in the name of saving humanity and planet earth. I will go even further: What is called “sustainability” is not even sustainable, not by a long shot. The irony is that the very implementation of “sustainable” policies will needlessly make life more difficult for everyone.

We are not even speaking about future events. The “food for fuel” mandates that are coming from governments around the world in the name of “sustainability” have helped drive up food prices and have worked real hardships on poor people. Moreover, food-based fuels, such as ethanol made from corn, are heavily subsidized and are imposed by government mandate.

Government is forcing individuals to do what they never would want to do on their own: pour a version of whiskey into their cars instead of drinking it.

Political Support

Not surprisingly, food-based fuels have a large constituency (although that constituency does not happen to include consumers of those fuels), and associated groups make political contributions and welcome rhetoric from politicians. For example, Newt Gingrich, who sounds like he’s running for the next year’s Republican presidential nomination, recently called for the government to mandate that all cars built in the United States be “flex-fuel,” enabling them to use ethanol.

Forcing consumers to purchase cars that they refuse to buy now only furthers our understanding of the intellectual bankruptcy and economic illiteracy that people like Gingrich promote. (Gingrich claimed that such a mandate would allow the ethanol industry to “stand on its own,” as though forcing Americans to use costly, inferior fuel would revitalize the U.S. economy, as he and others claim.)

The other darling of the sustainability movement is the building of thousands of electricity-generating windmills. Ironically, many environmentalists oppose these supposed “clean-energy” contraptions because they kill birds and change the landscape. Of course these projects also are heavily subsidized by government. But as electricity producers, they hardly are panaceas.

In 2009 President Barack Obama told Congress he would use “clean energy” to help “rebuild the economy.” Given that all the clean-energy pet projects seem to be subsidized, Obama was claiming that his government could bring about a recovery by giving huge subsidies to politically favored industries.

Economically, that is impossible. What Obama was saying was that he could rebuild a moribund economy by cannibalizing those still-healthy industries and transferring resources to those portions of the economy that never could stand on their own without government coercion.

Not only is that idea delusional, it also puts the government on an economic path that is unsustainable. Government can no more save the economy by destroying than the U.S. armed forces could save Vietnam by bombing it into the Stone Age.

While “sustainability” is little more than rhetoric, it is harmful rhetoric, as it carries the appeal to outright government coercion. Economically speaking, sustainability cannot sustain itself. Instead, it promotes a parasitic state that drains an economy – and its people – of energy and vitality.

I know that some people find this hard to understand — perhaps because they don’t want to understand — but people like me have never claimed that fiscal expansion is always and everywhere the right policy, even in response to recession….  All of the unorthodox policy recommendations and conclusions are contingent on the economy being in a liquidity trap, in which short-run nominal interest rates are up against the zero lower bound and can’t go lower.

And liquidity-trap conditions are rare; in fact, they’ve only happened twice in US history. Unfortunately, we’re living in one of those episodes right now.

Well, are we in a liquidity trap? And does the present situation require constant bursts of government spending?

Of course, Keynesians believe the answer to the first question is a resounding yes. The answer to the second logically would follow from the first: If Keynesianism really is true, only monetary policy and fiscal policy are available, and economic conditions determine their use.

The Government Alternative

Under the Keynesian paradigm, if monetary authorities cannot stimulate private spending by forcing down interest rates, then the only other avenue is for the government to borrow and create new money, and spend on its own projects. If the first option does not work, the second, by definition, must.

But in America’s Great Depression, Murray N. Rothbard said there is no liquidity trap:

Keynesians claim that “liquidity preference” (demand for money) may be so persistently high that the rate of interest could not fall low enough to stimulate investment sufficiently to raise the economy out of the depression. This statement assumes that the rate of interest is determined by “liquidity preference” instead of by time preference; and it also assumes again that the link between savings and investment is very tenuous indeed, only tentatively exerting itself through the rate of interest. But, on the contrary, it is not a question of saving and investment each being acted upon by the rate of interest; in fact, saving, investment, and the rate of interest are each and all simultaneously determined by individual time preferences on the market. Liquidity preference has nothing to do with this matter.

Rothbard continued that the very things Keynesians claim will worsen an economic downturn – including falling wages and prices and liquidation of capital – actually are necessary to speed up the readjustment. The Austrian-Keynesian divide is fundamental on this point;  Austrians not only reject the liquidity-trap paradigm, but also hold that the problem is boom-induced malinvested capital rather than idle capital.

Idle or Malinvested?

The distinction is important because Austrians say the economy cannot recover until the malinvested capital is transferred to other uses, liquidated, or abandoned altogether. Keynesians, on the other hand, claim that if government can spend enough money, the same capital that Austrians say is malinvested will be returned to full employment.

In other words, Keynesians hold that capital (as well as other factors of production) is homogeneous. An economy is like a cake mixture: Stir in water (money) and an economy appears. The only important ingredient is spending, and lots of it.

Austrians in contrast believe that an economy consists of heterogeneous assets that are directed by consumer choices. Thus attempts by government to drive this process only result in resources being directed to unsustainable purposes. Furthermore, Austrians hold that the current situation is not in a special case; instead, the government is justifying its actions using bad theory. Governments can neither fool Mother Nature nor violate the laws of economics.

That was then. Today, according to a federal prosecutor, a “terrorist” can be someone who privately creates and circulates a silver coin adorned with the dollar sign and denominated in dollar amounts but has a metallic value far above its face value. In fact, the coin in question was similar to the silver dollars that once circulated regularly in this country but have since disappeared. The prosecutor, Anne Tompkins, declared:

Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism. While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence, they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country. We are determined to meet these threats through infiltration, disruption, and dismantling of organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government.

This dastardly act of “terrorism” was committed by 67-year-old Bernard von NotHaus, who recently was convicted in federal court in North Carolina by a jury that deliberated for under two hours. He faces the rest of his life in prison for minting and circulating the Liberty Dollar. The Asheville Citizen notes: “The government also is seeking the forfeiture of about 16,000 pounds of Liberty Dollar coins and precious metals valued at nearly $7 million.”

It is sheer nonsense that von NotHaus engaged in behavior that is a “clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country.” But that’s a good description of Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

As one who remembers when the Johnson administration announced in 1965 that it no longer would make silver dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and dollars (replacing them with the infamous “sandwich” coins), I can say the charge that creating a silver coin undermines the U.S. economy is a howler. From QE1 and QE2 (quantitative easing) to the Fed’s inflation targets, if anyone has broken the very spirit of the act that will send Bernard von NotHaus to prison, it is Bernanke.

If von NotHaus did anything, he exposed the sorry fact that the U.S. government’s currency is hopelessly debased. If that is terrorism, then anyone who openly criticizes the monetary system is a terrorist. One wonders if prosecutors like Tompkins think the next level of terrorism prosecution is to go after those critics.

Frédéric Bastiat exposed the fallacy more than 150 years ago, and yet many people who should know better apparently never got the memo. One of the latest examples of “the blessings of destruction” analysis comes from Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel winner in economics:

[T]he nuclear catastrophe could end up being expansionary, if not for Japan then at least for the world as a whole. If this sounds crazy, well, liquidity-trap economics is like that — remember, World War II ended the Great Depression.

So Japan is hit with three catastrophes, a massive and powerful earthquake, a tsunami, and radiation-spewing meltdowns at a nuclear power plant — and this is considered “expansionary”? If one wishes to understand the intellectual bankruptcy of modern macroeconomic thinking, Krugman provides material.

Krugman Not Alone

However, what the great Walter Williams calls “economic lunacy” is not limited to Krugman. Others are following suit, claiming that the destruction of property in Japan actually is a positive thing, economically speaking. Williams first points out what other “respected” economists have written:

Economic lunacy abounds, and often the most learned, including Nobel Laureates, are its primary victims. The most recent example of economic lunacy is found in a Huffington Post article titled “The Silver Lining of Japan’s Quake” written by Nathan Gardels, editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, who has also written articles for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post.

Mr. Gardels says, “No one – least of all someone like myself who has experienced the existential terror of California’s regular tremors and knows the big one is coming here next – would minimize the grief, suffering and disruption caused by Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami. But if one can look past the devastation, there is a silver lining. The need to rebuild a large swath of Japan will create huge opportunities for domestic economic growth, particularly in energy-efficient technologies, while also stimulating global demand and hastening the integration of East Asia…. By taking Japan’s mature economy down a notch, Mother Nature has accomplished what fiscal policy and the central bank could not.”

Harvard University’s Professor Larry Summers, former Obama economic adviser and Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, said the disaster “may lead to some temporary increments, ironically, to GDP as a process of rebuilding takes place. In the wake of the earlier Kobe earthquake, Japan actually gained some economic strength.”

Williams quotes Bastiat:

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Williams then asks:

Would the Japanese economy face even greater opportunities for economic growth had the earthquake and tsunami also struck Tokyo, Hiroshima, Yokohama and other major cities? Would the 9-11 terrorists have done us an even bigger economic favor had they destroyed buildings in other cities? The belief that society benefits from destruction is lunacy.

Impeccable Logic

Williams’s logic is impeccable, yet time and again such wisdom is overlooked in favor of the folly of Keynesian “logic” on the alleged benefits of spending. As we have seen from those supposedly most learned in economics, formal graduate study of the discipline in some of our most august academic institutions is no guarantee that sound economics will be learned.

No, Japan is not experiencing the blessings of destruction. The Japanese people are going through sheer horror. To spin this tragedy into economic triumph is not just bad economics; it’s an obscenity.

On the other hand, some don’t care. The end is near, and there is no way to change the direction of things. So let’s have a toga party. Washington has too many interest groups wanting too many things, so we are supposed to pretend we are prosperous even if we are not.

The first view is more often heard, but the second seems to reflect how the political classes really act.

However, there is also a third viewpoint: There is no crisis at all. The U.S. government can borrow money indefinitely and by so doing, those debts magically will morph into “savings.”

I’m not joking. In a recent column, Paul Krugman (who wrote in his bestseller The Return of Depression Economics that when the government prints money, it can create a “free lunch”) said that in the short term the government is doing just fine and in the long term Obamacare will lower federal deficits

[Y]ou have to realize two things about the fiscal state of America. First, the nation is not, in fact, “broke.” The federal government is having no trouble raising money, and the price of that money — the interest rate on federal borrowing — is very low by historical standards. So there’s no need to scramble to slash spending now; we can and should be willing to spend now if it will produce savings in the long run. [Emphasis added.]

Second, while the government does have a long-run fiscal problem, that problem is overwhelmingly driven by rising health care costs….

So if you’re serious about deficits, you shouldn’t be pinching pennies now; you should be looking for ways to rein in health spending over the long term.

For Krugman, newly created or government-borrowed money seems to have a magic all its own. Just stir in new money and the economy magically blooms. However, as the Austrians and many in the neoclassical mainstream note, that is not an economy; it is a creation of some academic economists. A real economy involves heterogeneous assets and capital, with resources being moved via entrepreneurship from lower valued to higher valued uses.

The Scenario

The Krugman scenario seems to go as follows: 1) the government borrows and spends at its current record levels; 2) at some point the economy gains “traction” and then moves forward on its own; and 3) the budget deficits morph into surpluses and the savings Krugman refers. That might be true in Krugman’s highly stylized world in which academic economists create “models” that can be manipulated into affirming whatever their creators desire, but in the real world of heterogeneous assets and factors, that claim is nonsense.

What about Obamacare? Won’t it lower medical costs and thus drive down the costs of Medicare and Medicaid? One has to remember that Krugman is not referring to opportunity costs, as economists understand costs, but rather administrative numbers. In his view, just lower the numbers by fiat (which is done mostly by delaying or denying care), and the deficits take care of themselves.

Free marketers might lament that Krugman’s views receive top billing in Washington, but we should not be surprised when the words of a hardcore statist are welcomed by those who wield political power and benefit from it. In the end, the economic crisis is the ugly child of politics as usual, and now it is time to pay the piper.

Declaring “broke” a “hollow cry,” the Times says that recent statements to the contrary by prominent Republicans are false:

It’s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more “broke” than a family with a mortgage or a college loan. And states have to balance their budgets. Though it may disappoint many conservatives, there will be no federal or state bankruptcies.

The problem, the Times says, is that government does not tax people enough, nor does it spend enough money.

Filmmaker Moore recently agrees He told protesters in Madison, Wisconsin, that the only problem is that taxes on wealthy people are too low:

America is not broke…. Wisconsin is not broke. The only thing that’s broke is the moral compass of the rulers.

Moore added that America is “awash in wealth and cash” and all that is needed to put the economy back on track is for the government to seize additional property from Americans who make more than he deems “moral.” (Note that Moore, a millionaire many times over through movies that trash capitalism, does not offer to give all his wealth to the needy.)

I suppose that both Moore and the Times are correct that if the government were to seize most or all of Americans’ cash and property holdings, the federal budget most likely could be balanced. For now.

The problem here is obvious on its face. If people had all their earnings confiscated by the State, they would no longer be willing to work and the government then would have nothing or almost nothing to tax in the future.

Borrowing to Pay Debts

There also is a huge problem with the Times’ mortgage analogy. The Treasury is borrowing money to make payments on previously borrowed money. If I were paying for my groceries with a credit card and borrowing money to make my mortgage payments, and it was clear my projected income over many years would not cover my expenses, that would be the very definition of “broke.”

No doubt the Times editors and Moore would counter that the government can ramp up tax rates and also create money to pay its bills (unlike you and me since the law forbids us to steal and counterfeit). But by forcing up taxes government would consume even more wealth produced by private individuals, and creating new money to pay its bills is a fraud that steals purchasing power from the rest of us.

I suspect these things are lost on the Times and Moore, who declared that wealth is “a national resource” to be confiscated by the State.

The wealth Americans produce does not come from a bottomless well, and it is clear that the current fiscal crisis is not due to government’s undertaxing the people. Rather the crisis exists because government spends too much, while taxation, regulatory, and monetary policy prevent economic recovery.

Any entity that has to borrow money to stay afloat because long-term income prospects are dismal is broke. True, government can temporarily hide the crisis by more borrowing and inflating, but in the end the bankruptcy cannot and will not be hidden.

Ritter claims clean energy will “re-energize the economy”:

Building this new economy starts with understanding how clean energy legislation can create jobs. During my four-year term in Colorado, I signed 57 pieces of clean energy legislation. In 2007, for example, we doubled the proportion of energy in the state that is required to come from renewable sources to 20 percent by 2020. In 2010, we increased that to 30 percent for our biggest utility. As a result, Colorado now ranks fourth among the 50 states in its number of clean energy workers per capita, and 1,500 clean energy companies call our state home — an 18 percent increase since 2004. Wind- and solar-energy companies that have built factories and opened offices in Colorado have brought in thousands of new jobs.

Ritter continues with more of his “accomplishments,” and then urges Americans to follow President Obama’s plans:

Last year we capped our clean energy work with a bill that required shutting down several dirty, inefficient coal plants and replacing them with cleaner energy fuels, principally natural gas.

President Obama’s goal to produce 80 percent of America’s energy from clean sources by 2035 is absolutely achievable. But as Washington ponders its next move on energy legislation, governors can and should lead the way.

Socialism Failed

Unfortunately, while the rhetoric sounds promising, everything he wrote is nonsense. Like most American politicians, Ritter fails to understand that socialism really is a failure, and that a 25-year plan for “clean energy” development has no more chance of succeeding than any of the infamous Five-Year Plans first hatched by Josef Stalin. Colorado and the U.S. government don’t send critics of their plans to the gulag, but the “clean energy” advocates do demand that the authorities use the iron fist of coercion to achieve their goals.

My question is this: If these energy sources are so wonderful and such great investments, why do all those ventures have to be subsidized directly by tax dollars or indirectly by government mandates? If these were the profitable and job-creating ventures that Ritter claims they are, why have private firms not jumped in without the government promise to backstop their losses?

Internalize the Externalities!

If the answer is that the government has favored oil by socializing some of its costs, then the proper solution is: Internalize all the costs and let all products compete on a level playing field — no favors, no obstacles.

In a truly free market, entrepreneurs make profits by directing resources from lower valued to higher valued uses – as ultimately determined by consumers. The “clean energy economy” of which Ritter speaks assumes government knows what kinds of energy we should be using. It cannot have such knowledge. Only the free market can say.

It is impossible to build a sustainable economic recovery on subsidized “green energy,” no matter how much rhetoric to the contrary comes from Washington and the governors’ mansions. An economy cannot grow unless entrepreneurs freely can mesh their plans with consumer wishes. For Ritter to claim that government can coerce us into prosperity is not alternative wisdom; it is delusion.

Imagine my surprise, then, when on camera and in daylight, doctors in Wisconsin have been writing fraudulent “excuses” for teachers who have been demonstrating at the state capitol over recent moves by the governor and the legislature to abolish collective bargaining for public-employee unions. (The teachers claim they were sick, which is why they were not in the classrooms.) Indeed, the doctors have not even tried to cover their actions. One observer quoted by the MacIver Institute, Christian Hartsock, said:

I asked this doctor what he was doing and he told me they were handing out excuses to people who were feeling sick due to emotional, mental or financial distress. They never performed an exam – he asked me how I was feeling today and I said I’m from California and I’m not used to the cold, so he handed me a note.

Other doctors held up signs offering to sign excuse notes for teachers. They not only signed their names but also included their Wisconsin medical license numbers, as required on a medical form. They seemed proud of what they are doing.

Open Fraud

Nothing is being done about this open fraud so far, and I cannot say I am surprised. The Obama administration has been front and center in this whole protest, even helping to coordinate some activities. (The White House now is denying it played any role, but the tweets from Organizing for America and Brad Woodhouse, the Democratic Party communications director, paint a much different scene.)

The reason I make this point is that the teachers clearly have engaged in activities approved by the Obama administration, yet to be at the capitol without taking personal leave, the teachers have called in sick. Since they are not really sick, they are engaging in fraud, and therefore any doctor who knowingly writes an excuse note for someone he or she has not examined is writing medical document with “no medical purpose” — which violates federal criminal fraud statutes. The videotapes are evidence of federal crimes.

I will stop here and point out that I have written against these statutes for years, precisely because they are so expansive and so easily applied that any prosecutor wanting to get someone can do so without any problems. Levrenty Berias’s “Show me the man and I will find the crime” threat is now firmly established at the U.S. Department of Justice as a legal doctrine.

Even though these fraud statutes tend to be, well, fraudulent, they are applied against doctors every day. Last fall, I saw a childhood friend of more than 50 years sentenced to what in effect is a life term in federal prison for “writing prescriptions for which there was no medical purpose.” The DOJ is persecuting Siobhan Reynolds merely because she spoke out against similar prosecutions.

Yet here were have doctors on camera breaking the law — with impunity — purely for political reasons, and the Usual Suspects are not interested. The same people who will move heaven and earth to destroy the career and family of a well-respected doctor like William Hurwitz apparently don’t care that doctors are committing real fraud to help unionized teachers break the law.

So there we have it. Engage in behavior that this government considers to be politically acceptable and get a free pass to break the law. Everyone else gets to go to prison.