The theme of President Bush’s inaugural address was liberty. But President Bush’s record tells a different story. First it should be noted that under Bush’s watch the U.S., for the first time ever, has fallen out of the top 10 most economically free nations in the world. This is according to the most recent Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. When George Bush took office, the U.S. ranked 4th. Today it is 12th. The maximization of liberty requires the minimization of government and yet the Bush administration, in addition to increasing spending to taxpayer-crushing levels has dramatically expanded the federal government’s role in education and has given us a massive increase in the Medicare entitlement. To point out a few other areas where liberty is not the President’s strong suit–he doesn’t think that American consumers of steel or pharmaceuticals should have the liberty to buy from suppliers who live outside the country, or that cancer patients should have the liberty to smoke marijuana to relieve their symptoms (let alone that people should have the liberty to use marijuana or other now illegal drugs for other reasons); that people should have the liberty of doing what they please with their property regardless of whether the EPA has declared it a wetland (he has not retracted his father’s “no-net-loss of wetlands” policy); since the Bush EPA strongly advocates smart growth policies he apparently doesn’t believe that people should have the liberty to build whatever kind of house they want on whatever size lot they want…