We’ve all heard it before: There aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Americans are working longer hours, both parents have full-time jobs or more, their credit-card debts are soaring like runaway hot-air balloons, and they don’t have the time to think about what’s fueling the rat race.

At some point in your life, you say, you have to come back to earth.

Here’s a suggestion. When you finally get home from work, turn the TV to the TNT channel. What you’re likely to hear is hucksterism’s typical pitch: “What if I told you about a product that could miraculously give you more time for yourself and your family, make you happier, and in general revolutionize your life? Would you buy it? Of course you would!

“That’s impossible, you say? Say hello to …. the answer to all your dreams.”

“Right,” you mumble sarcastically and turn off the TV. But wait, I say! Such a miraculous product does exist. It’s called self-empowerment. Its patent was granted long before that of any merchandise on the market. Instructions for its use are written in the U.S. and N.C. constitutions.

Self-empowerment works especially well as an antidote to big government—the single biggest thief of Americans’ time and money. According to The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan government watchdog organization, Americans worked 116 days in 2006 just to pay their taxes. In other words, we’re pack mules for the government—federal, state, and local—about one in every three days of the year.

The burden in North Carolina is especially onerous. Our state’s top marginal tax rates on individual (8.25 percent) and corporate (6.9 percent) income are the highest in the Southeast. They are the ninth highest in the nation. North Carolina’s tax on gasoline—30.15 cents per gallon in spring 2006—was sixth highest in the nation. The combined state and local sales tax rate of 7.05 percent is ninth highest among states that also have an income tax.

Gov. Mike Easley and the General Assembly ensure that our burden remains heavy by continually raising government spending. They call it “fiscal restraint” to spend a tax surplus when the economy is good and raise taxes when the economy is bad. By so doing, they reneged on promises to taxpayers that back-to-back increases in sales taxes would be “temporary.”

By their dishonesty and arrogance, our “public servants” are telling us that after they take their cut, its our problem to sustain ourselves the other two days.

Here’s where self-empowerment comes in. Citizens can make paying the bills politicians’ problem. For starters, in North Carolina, we should:
• Insist on a constitutional amendment that institutes term limits for all elected state officials. The long-term dominance of one party inevitably leads to cronyism and corruption. A multitude of trials, convictions, and prison sentences the last few years at all levels of state government evinces the critical need for reform.
• Stem out-of-control spending by forcing the political elite to impose discipline on themselves through an expenditure limit during every budget cycle. A taxpayers’ bill or rights (TABOR), like that in Colorado, would work wonders.
• Force the legislature to stop gerrymandering districts. The lack of competition for state offices has reduced many elections to laughingstock status.
• Elect principled people dedicated to public service rather than addicted to party power plays.
• Institute recall propositions, such as those in California, to remind politicians where the real power lies. A litany of N.C. scandals and of incidents violating the constitution requires harsh measures.

These improvements wouldn’t guarantee that we would get our lives back, but they would mark a beginning. Eventually, we might be able to regain some of the natural rights and freedom that our ancestors enjoyed.

In the process we could reclaim our time and dignity and leap-frog from being the big boys’ beasts of burden to princes of public power, as it should be.

Richard C. Wagner is the editor of Carolina Journal.