The Peruvian government is spying on its critics, real or imagined.

The first revelations came out a year and a half ago but were summarily dismissed by President Ollanta Humala. Now a profusion of videos, documents, and other evidence has been leaked out by insiders at the National Intelligence Directorate (DINI), an organization headed by a former soldier from the same graduating class as the President, also a retired officer, at the military academy.

President Humala repeatedly attacked and even mocked the new revelations—until evidence came out that his vice president, a dissident who was pushed aside by the president’s wife when she tried to become head of the Congress, was being spied on. Fearing a major crisis once she tweeted her disgust at the news that she was a target (many believe the vice president found out she was under surveillance and leaked the information), Humala has promised to “open” the DINI to a parliamentary committee . . . controlled by the ruling party.

The new governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, appears to have confused a lot of people in a recent speech about Medicaid, the joint state-federal welfare program for poor people’s health coverage.

According to the Washington Post’s Jason Millman, “Republicans are finally learning they can’t undo Obamacare,” because the governor wants to do something different to Medicaid than what his Democratic predecessor wanted. Politicio’s Sarah Wheaton, on the other hand, reports that the new governor wants to “end his state’s Obamacare Medicaid experiment.”

This week more than 11,000 events will be held nationwide in celebration of school choice.

Also, for the first time ever, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution recognizing January 25-30, 2015, as National School Choice Week to help improve awareness of the benefits of greater opportunities in education. More than 100 governors, mayors, and county leaders are also expected to pass similar resolutions.

[Editor’s Note: The Independent Institute hosted a sold-out event, “Developing the Developed World: Entrepreneurship, Liberty, and the Future,” with Peter Thiel on Tuesday, January 27, 2015.]

“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.” —Peter Thiel

With this opening paragraph, legendary investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel immediately launches into the central lesson of his new book Zero to One. Creating new things in the form of truly “fresh and strange” technology is what will propel the economies of the future, not minute tinkering or copying of existing practices. This is what he describes as going from 0 to 1. To get to the future, startups are the key.

Having launched or played critical roles in supporting multiple successful companies including PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, SpaceX, and LinkedIn, Mr. Thiel’s views on technology, innovation and entrepreneurship were of particular interest to me. Zero to One has proven to be a delightful read full of insights for students, young professionals, and seasoned industry insiders. Each chapter contains ideas that are provocative and original.

Popular opinion seems to be that falling prices — or even stable prices — are bad for the economy, but I’ve never seen any good arguments about why.  I’ve just read another article about this, that gives six clearly numbered reasons, so let’s look at what the article says to see if they hold up.

As the world observes conflicts in Iraq, Syria, the Ukraine, and elsewhere, the impact on human life is undeniably tragic. Nowhere is this tragedy more pronounced than in the impact of these conflicts have on children.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel, more than 10,000 children have died in the Syrian conflict. In addition to these immediate threats against life and limb, war has other consequences for children. Conflict disrupts a child’s education and grinds economic activity around the conflict zone to a halt. This delay in education and stunted economic activity perversely impacts young lives both now and in the future. It is estimated that some 40 million children are out of school in conflict-affected countries throughout the world.

As if this damage were not enough, some children bear an even greater burden. They are soldiers.

There are an estimated 250,000 child soldiers in world today. These children, often abducted from their homes by armed forces, are desirable as soldiers because they are easier to control than adults, have an underdeveloped sense of danger, and use fewer resources than a comparable adult. Children are often sent into battle as infantry in order to draw fire away from adult combatants.

In response to this problem, members of the international community have taken steps to curtail the practice throughout the globe. In the United States, the Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 (CSPA) was meant to assist the goal of ending child soldiering by banning the U.S. from sending military assistance to countries with “governmental armed forces or government–supported armed groups, including paramilitaries, militias, or civil defense forces, that recruit and use child soldiers.”

In 2010, President Obama signed into law an additional bill, the Lord’s Resistance Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, and pledged the U.S. would help end the “killing, raping…and brutalizing [of] children” in Joseph Kony’s army of “Invisible Children.”

So did the U.S. government fulfill its supposed goal of snuffing out child soldiering by withholding aid? Not by a long shot. Just five months after his 2010 pledge, Obama granted several waivers to the Child Soldier Prevention Act, allowing funding to continue to four countries known to use child soldiers.  Chad, Congo, Sudan, and Yemen each received a reprieve for a variety of reasons including their assistance in fighting terrorism. Congo was exempted because of American programs in the country aimed at training the military to “be more professional.”  During the Obama administration, Congo, Yemen, and Chad would each receive millions in weapons despite their humanitarian records and the known use of child soldiers.

The consequences of such actions are tragic. As I’ve discussed in other posts, there are a variety of problems with using weapons as aid. Even if we assume that the military equipment given to these countries is initially sent for legitimate purposes, it is practically impossible to control the flow of these weapons after they reach foreign soil. These weapons allow conflicts to grow, perpetuate, and provide the arsenal for future conflicts. These arms fuel the very humanitarian crises the U.S. government supposedly wants to combat. Those who pay the highest price for these policies may be the most innocent.

There have been a lot of predictions about the future of employer-based health benefits under Obamacare. Reports suggest that increasing numbers of small businesses are dropping health benefits and sending their employees to Obamacare’s insurance exchanges, where they are partially subsidized.

Other businesses have found a bigger cost-shifting approach. BeneStream, a new benefits advisor, advises employers how to make their workers dependent on Medicaid, a welfare program fully funded by taxpayers. And businesses are taking advantage of its advice.

So: Are these employers corporate welfare queens?

Top stories in world news last week:

• New Snowden Documents Reveal that the NSA is Preparing for Cyber War

According to top secret documents from the archive of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seen exclusively by SPIEGEL, they are planning for wars of the future in which the Internet will play a critical role, with the aim of being able to use the net to paralyze computer networks and, by doing so, potentially all the infrastructure they control, including power and water supplies, factories, airports or the flow of money.

• The New Congress, Businesses, and Individual Americans struggle to come to grips with the fatally flawed Affordable Care Act as many of its provisions come into effect in 2015. The Supreme Court is expected to again rule on whether the law’s language is to be read as written, or plain English re-written, e.g., “Mandate” really means “Tax.” Do exchanges “established by a State” actually mean “federal exchanges”?

• World Leaders March in Anti-Terrorism Rally in Paris

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama’s top concerns of the week:

• Obama Proposes “Free” Community College for All
  With the federal K-12 educational system a fraud perpetrated on students, and community college now primarily remedial education for the resulting uneducated, President Obama offers the usual response to government failure: tax and spend more.

• President Obama Proposes Paid Sick Leave for All
  With labor force participation at historic lows, is it a great idea to make employment even more expensive?

• Obama Administration Targets Unhealthy Food at Day-care Centers

Not exactly an agenda that screams “greatness.”

Adhering to the methodology of our Recarving Rushmore, I of course agree that the sole legitimate role of the Presidency is defined by the Constitution, and the sole metric for greatness is the level of peace, prosperity, and liberty afforded Americans under any given administration.

It’s thus high time for disunion: Having abandoned any pretense of protecting Americans’ liberties, and exercising increasing tyranny over every aspect of our lives, the presidency must be returned to strict constraints.

Let’s just say No, keep saying No, and tell our friends to say No.

California Governor Jerry Brown

As a teenager, Jerry Brown left Santa Clara University to attend a Jesuit seminary, intent on becoming a Catholic priest. Moral arguments in the context of public-policy debates have always been important to him. So during his inaugural address on January 5, as he became California’s governor for an historic fourth term, Brown quoted biologist Edward O. Wilson regarding climate change: “Surely one moral precept we can agree on is to stop destroying our birthplace, the only home humanity will ever have. . . . [W]e are needlessly turning the gold we inherited from our forebears into straw, and for that we will be despised by our descendants.”

Unfortunately, Governor Brown chose to focus moral outrage on the climate issue alone, and he failed to make the moral argument against California’s public pension system, which represents the state’s greatest financial challenge since the Great Depression and is a severe threat to future generations.

In his speech, Governor Brown said: “[W]e must not lose sight of our long-term liabilities. We have to face honestly the enormous and ever growing burden of the many commitments we have already made. Among these are the costs of pensions and retiree health care . . .”

He said further: “My plan has been to take them on one at a time. We have now taken steps to deal with the unfunded teachers’ pensions and those of the [state] public employees.”

About three months ago, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard ended her life. Diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, her prognosis was less than grim, with the average life expectancy of similar patients about 14 months.

Upon receiving her diagnosis, Maynard and her husband moved to Oregon, where the state’s “Death with Dignity” law would allow her to end her own life using a high dose of sedatives prescribed by her doctor.

Brittany’s story received nationwide attention. Now Brittany’s husband, Dan Diaz, is sparking further debate by discussing his wife’s decision in an interview with Meredith Vieria. In particular, people debate, does someone have the right to die? What unintended consequences may occur as a result?

Let’s begin with a thought experiment. Suppose you were diagnosed, like Brittany, with some incurable, painful, ultimately fatal disease. Armed with the knowledge and ability to painlessly end your life, would you consider it? To be honest, I don’t know that I could do it (I’m not sure I can square it with my moral compass). But even if I wouldn’t, I cannot say that I would deny that choice for another person.