I'm on vacation this week (11/13/'06) and I figured I ought to add an article to my site. But I wasn't sure what to write. I could, of course, write about the recent election. But I don't think the results mean much.

Here in Arkansas one of the Democrats running for congress (the incumbent) had advertisements running in which he talked about "conservative" values. He's no "neoconservative," and I'm sure he has serious doubts about George Bush's approach to the world. But his approaches won't do much to assuage the fears of most liberals like myself.

Someone at work recently told me that if Hillary Clinton became president there would be an assassination and revolt. He feared she'd take guns away from people, allow gay marriage, etc. So while Democrats may have control of congress that may reflect the long preference of the American people to have a government split between the two parties (a la 1994), not a call for a major change of course.

At any rate, recent Democrats have made some pretty lousy moves in governing, such as voting for the insane war in Iraq. I'm not sure I trust them to improve the lot of the working poor by very much.

But my wife prevailed on me to eat out with her today. On our way to the restaurant we heard a news report on an interview given last night to ABC television by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. He talked about his judicial philosophy. I found some things encouraging, but others problematic.

In talking about rulings the court makes he said justices should seek unanimity whenever possible. Rulings should be as narrow as possible. The lower courts will understand the legal issues addressed in the case, he said. Sounds like judicial restraint to me, meaning it's not likely that people like him on the court will go along with the president's desires to radically redefine our constitution.

I have already addressed the current definition of judicial activism. What the religious conservatives dislike about these courts is that they keep telling the government it shouldn't be regulating personal behavior in the ways they seek.

I guess you could call me a small government liberal. I think government should be as small as it can and still support a robust society. We need protection from criminals, but we also need a way to keep so many people from turning to crime. Better programs in the latter section mean less resources needed in the first.

One barrier to the growth of government is a court that recognizes that the constitution allows few legitimate government operations and reserves all other rights "to the states or to the people."

Can the federal government today be as limited as it was in 1798? I doubt it. But I do think we could take a paring axe to parts of government without serious impact on most people's lives. We need, however, to recognize what to keep and what to throw out.

At that the current administration and Justice Roberts are particularly unsuited. Here's the criteria. This country stands for individual rights. That means the rights of the individual are more important than the rights of large groups of individuals. Corporations, unions, and other bodies where people get together for mutual advantage should have a disadvantage in addressing government compared to individual citizens.

Businesses and the government have long kept telling us the lie that the only way to have a robust economy is for businesses to thrive. They have used that lie to promote policies that thwart the liberties of individual Americans.

What really makes the economy work well is when people are productive. In this country only the working class is truly productive. Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people get paid just to control the productive. Why?

Let's be realistic and place at least part of the blame on the people who are expected to be productive. Like all other humans they want to get the most with the least effort. So it takes supervisors and managers to get them to work productively.

But let's look at the reverse side of that. The loss of freedom separates them from their work and from the pride of self-directed success. The field of management has tried many things through the years to alleviate that effect, but none of them has worked perfectly.

The point is that it might be possible, even in this woefully less than perfect world, to devise a system for worker motivation that makes more people productive. That would do more to enhance our economy than any management program or government benefits to business.

I know this is a little off topic, but let me add this. Years ago I met a Democrat-Conservative (this was in New York State) town supervisor who used to appear at public hearings and oppose tax deferrments to attract businesses to the area.

Business has so worked the system that they can convince us to give them tax breaks so they'll move to our area. If all localities had stood firm on the issue, we wouldn't be spending public money on private enterprise. But now a locality that refused to give tax breaks would die for lack of employment.

But now back to our main issue, the comments of John Roberts. He talked about the source of his staunch conservatism. He explained that he was appalled back in the '60s by the actions of students protesting the war. He felt like they were cheering for our "enemy."

That's revealing and frightening. Who made the North Vietnamese our enemy? We did. Conservatives will blame that on Democrats, since Lyndon Johnson was in office when we moved in. Barry Goldwater tried to make the war an issue in his unsuccessful campaign to replace Johnson as president. (The more things change, the more they remain the same, even if they are reversed.)

The war's opponents are probably guilty of "throwing out the baby with the bath water." But to reject everything they stood for out of hand is to miss the point on key issues of freedom and international citizenship. So the Republicans are repeating history because errors of the past caused them to reject important lessons from history.

The conclusion is that Justice Roberts' affirmed judicial restraint is the only thing standing between us and a wholesale defeat of our liberties by an administration clearly opposed to them.

And now the really bad news. The Democratic win last week may be just what the Republicans ordered, since it could well backfire and give Republicans the White House in '08. Already presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is under fire for supporting candidates for congressional positions who have ethical problems in their past.

That could well be just the ammunition the Republicans need to bury Democrats in two years' time. And if they get all three again (both houses of congress and the administration) our liberties will be in even greater jeopardy.