Liberalism not at fault for recent scandals … If in any of these situations even one person of influence had adhered to the basic tenets of liberalism all of these scandals could have been avoided … Never mind that there is zero correlation between the political ideology called liberalism and the cascading scandals of the Obama administration. If anything, it's the opposite: it's the undeniably illiberal actions of people within the government that has created these crises. To suggest that any of this happened because the government is too big, or even that the aim of liberalism is to make government bigger, is a gross distortion. – USA Today

Dominant Social Theme: It is not the size of government that matters but the intentions.

Free-Market Analysis: According to this editorial at USA Today, good intentions can triumph over power. We are supposed to ignore the insight that "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," and embrace the idea that even the biggest government can be brought to heel by good intentions.

To us this is a kind of logical fallacy. Big government is force and to ignore this fundamental insight is to ignore the reality of expansive bureaucratic configurations. They have been built to benefit those who stand behind government and reap rewards from its deliberate use of force, not for our benefit.

This is not a debatable proposition, as any disinterested analysis of history will reveal this as a fact. But USA Today nonetheless wishes to argue otherwise. Here is more:

Scandals happen under every president, regardless of the size of the government and regardless of the political ideology of the leader of that government. It so happens that the claim that government is bigger under President Obama than any time in history — an oft-repeated trope — is actually not even true. Not counting the military, there were 3,054,000 federal employees in 1988, the last full year conservative standard bearer Ronald Reagan was in office. In 2011, there were 2,756,000 — a reduction of 10% from Reagan.

Even characterizing the IRS scandal as a "big government" problem is silly: less than 200 employees in a single Cincinnati office had to process 60,000 non-profit applications. Government bloat this is not.

What about the Department of Justice spying on reporters in an effort to ferret out whistle-blowers? This would count as a big government intrusion, but it's not liberal. In fact, it's just the kind of expansive government power conservatives have championed and true liberals loathe.

There is nothing liberal about Obama's full embrace of the George W. Bush agenda to expand executive power to infringe on American's civil liberties. The fact that there have been so few intellectually honest liberals calling Obama out for this government abuse is not an indictment of liberalism, it's an indictment of the institutional left who behave more like ends-justify-the-means Obama cultists than liberals.

Then there is Benghazi. It is unclear how even the most willfully dishonest person could distort this travesty into an indictment of liberalism or blame it on big government. The fundamental scandal here is that the government scapegoated a private American citizen who made a YouTube video (constitutionally protected free speech) for their inability to protect American embassy workers in Benghazi.

The paradigm used by this editorial is simply incorrect, unfortunately. The IRS scandal, the spying on reporters and even the Benghazi matter have clear-cut affiliations. That is they tell us a good deal about the concerns and aspirations about those in power. And what they tell us has little to do with a kinder or gentler US government.

In each case, in fact, we can see that the US Fedgov is targeting those who want to defend and expand individual liberty. This is the brief of the Tea Party and certainly the US mainstream press, as tame as it is, represents a further power nexus that at least occasionally competes with the power of government and can offer a compelling alternative message.

Finally, there is Benghazi. Here, there is compelling evidence that the CIA set up an operation that went wrong. The idea perhaps was to produce a fake film that would suddenly explode worldwide (as it did) and appear to alienate the Muslim community, especially in the Middle East. This polarization was perhaps to aid in President Obama's re-election, among other things. For one reason or another this "black op" soured and thus Congress "investigates" the remains today.

In each case, then, we can see an activist government at work pursuing a policy that further expands its power. There is nothing about this that is either unclear or unusual.

The USA Today editorial wants to pretend otherwise. But the US Empire is a mighty one, indeed, the biggest ever created, without a doubt. Operating out of Britain, Rome, Washington and Tel Aviv, it spans the world and controls commerce and engages in warfare with a global reach.

The US government and its backers are apparently involved right now in some 75 wars and skirmishes. Its money printing in aggregate controls the world's economy. Its military-industrial complex spies on hundreds of millions if not billions at home and abroad.

This is indeed "Leviathan," and is a reason why this editorial cannot be taken seriously. Using dominant social themes, those who control the current empire continue to promote their ultimate goal, which is globalism and one formal corporate economy controlled by them.

Whatever USA Today believes is liberalism, it is not this – this incredible package of control and economic domination. When we contemplate it, we recall that power does indeed corrupt and that no one entity should have accrued this sort of power.

But we believe in this Internet Era that the power of the current empire may have reached its apex. This is, in fact, the most compelling story of the 21st century and one that has investment and employment ramifications that will expand like ripples on a pond.

In this century everything revolves around the waxing and waning of globalist power and "liberalism" has little or nothing to do with it.