WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Clinton lied to the American people and committed high crimes and
misdemeanors for which any ordinary citizen would have been punished under the law. That pro-impeachment line can also teach a valuable lesson about the role of government.

A good test of any government policy is whether it would be legal for any private citizen to conduct the
same activity. Here the government fares much worse than the embattled Mr. Clinton.

An employer who paid her most productive workers less money the harder and longer they worked would quickly
find herself in legal trouble. Yet under our current tax policies, the harder you work, the more the
government takes from you. And as a glance at your pay statement will verify, they even get your money before
you do in the form of withholding. By any standard, this is as immoral as recent acts in the Oval Office.
The government has an excuse for this behavior, but that is wrong too.

When thieves break into banks and homes, they take the wealth they find from the rightful owners and
redistribute it to themselves and their cronies. Judges and juries still throw them in the slammer even if they
claim to have stolen out of necessity or given the money to a friend who needed it. But the government
does the same thing and gets away with it.

Under our current confiscatory tax policies, the government redistributes your hard-earned money to
other people, who did not earn it, for their personal use. This is not the same as paying taxes for services
it is neither practical nor prudent for people to perform on their own.

Gangs in the Los Angeles area have made it virtually impossible for some homeowners to use their own
property. Local governments have responded with police crackdowns and legal injunctions. Yet unelected
bureaucrats and the zealous regulators of the EPA have made it impossible for many landowners to use their own property, a form of taking without compensation. But those who own no property do not escape.

If a bank or investment house set up a plan in which they used the money of new investors to pay off earlier
investors--the classic Ponzi scheme--they would be arrested for fraud and imprisoned. Yet this is
precisely what Social Security does. The notion that your payroll taxes are held in trust for you is really
a lie, no less than the ones the President told about Miss Lewinsky.

That money goes directly to another person for their personal use, or to pay off other government expenses,
perhaps the largest scale fraud in modern times. Not only does this happen without penalty, but it comes
with political approval from both sides of the aisle.

Republicans pride themselves on supporting a lower rate of theft than Democrats. They excuse it by passing
legislation that makes them feel noble. But what they are doing is violating the key principle of democratic
society, the rule of law, which stands above politicians, bureaucrats, judges, and even presidents.

Mr. Clinton is finding out about that principle the hard way. So will the nation if we don’t start impeaching immoral and fraudulent policies and replacing them with ones based on honesty and the rule of law.

-- K. Lloyd Billingsley