They call him Dr. No.

But medical doctor and Congressman Ron Paul does more than vote against awful and unconstitutional legislation. He has also proposed many bills to roll back the government’s assault on our liberties — bills to get rid of the income tax, minimum wage laws, antitrust laws.

Of course, to advocate undoing decades of ever-more-brazen governmental interference in our lives is to swim against the tide. To most congressmen, the idea of limiting federal governance to constitutionally authorized functions is so old-fashioned as to be perverse. So Paul hasn’t had much luck with his initiatives.

But one of them is now back on the table: A bill authorizing the GAO to audit the Federal Reserve. Paul first advanced it in the early ’80s, and since then it’s been gathering dust. But thanks to the way the Fed has been conducting itself during the financial crisis, with all its massive yet secretive bailouts and interventions, the bill is now popular.

It has a good shot at passing.

Ron Paul himself won’t be voting for it, however. It’s going to be packaged with other legislation to impose new financial regulations, regulations he opposes. Paul says: “I won’t vote for a bill that’s a disaster because one or two or five percent of it is an improvement.”

Can’t argue with that. If only all our representatives had such scruples.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Government is a business — a big business, employing more people than any other. It dominates by regulating, restricting, taxing and subsidizing.

Government is also “too big to fail,” which is why, increasingly, politicians and public employee union bosses have ascended to the top of the heap of a growing army of competing lesser groups, always asking — no, demanding — more money.

This growing sector depends not on the decisions of dispersed customers and donors and investors, but on decisions concentrated in Washington, and, to a lesser extent, the state capital . . . and city hall.

The federal boys splurge far over their revenues — by the trillions, beyond the Ionosphere — courtesy of foreign creditors and the printing press. Governments at the state and local level tend to be more restrained, existing nearly on the same level as the rest of society, in a sort of Stratosphere (if not Troposphere) of finance.

Indeed, they are constitutionally forced to balance budgets, can be limited in their power to tax, and are not allowed to print money. Often, they must even ask voters for permission to borrow.

Add on the initiative and referendum, and we can gain some control over governments closest to home.

Not so at the federal level, where often the only effective response to government corruption and excess is a sort of recycling program by late-night comedians.

This makes our laughter at national politicians a tad bittersweet. Or just bitter.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Sometimes you just have to scratch your head.

Nathan Koppel, in an article at the Wall Street Journal’s online site, finds it odd that a former Bush administration attorney is now in private practice arguing against a prosecutor who fabricated evidence in a murder suit. A similar piece at law.com, by Tony Mauro, proclaims that, “To Build Practice, Ex-Bush [Solicitor General] Embraces Liberal Clients.”

Now, I’m not exactly a conservative, but I make common cause with conservatives all the time. Many of my best friends are conservative, and so are some of my best ideas. So I ask you: Since when is defending a wrongfully convicted man against a lying, unjust prosecutor any more “liberal” than “conservative”?

Does conservatism really mean letting governments cook up evidence to throw innocents into prison?

No.

And yet both of these writers characterized former Solicitor General Paul Clement as somehow liberal and un-conservative for “embracing” — yes — “liberal clients.”

Well, a hug was involved. But if a lawyer ably defended you against a malign, immoral agent of the state, mightn’t you offer a hug?

Embraces aside, the issue at hand is neither conservative nor liberal. Americans — of any party — oppose injustice. Right?

Or: left?

This is not a matter of left-right disagreement. Or party politics. Or, even, America vs. other nations. It’s simple justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

ACORN, a government-funded community activist group long noted for hard-left stances, has been earning more and more notoriety for sundry shady practices.

During the presidential campaign, the organization got in trouble for voter fraud. ACORN officials blamed a few bad apples. But phony registrations filed by its employees have been discovered in a slew of states. In 2008, 14 states began investigating the group for fraud.

Then there’s the ease with which many ACORN employees are willing to advise sex slave traders on how to avoid taxes.

As you no doubt know, in September of this year, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe posed as a prostitute and a pimp at many ACORN offices. They pretended to seek advice on how to avoid paying taxes for income from the child prostitutes they said they were importing into the country. They recorded these visits with a hidden camera, and employees in all too many offices proved eager to help. ACORN responded by firing implicated employees . . . and suing Giles and O’Keefe.

Now it is coming to light that — to save money — ACORN bosses have been telling paid employees to work for them as volunteers, instead, and earn their pay by collecting unemployment insurance. This, as blogger Michael McCray notes, would be a form of fraud.

A fraud to match other ACORN policies, I guess, and the handout mentality that permeates our nation’s capital.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Does $40.3 million seem like a lot of money to you? It does to me.

But to the Social Security Administration? It’s a drop in the bucket.

Or, a drop out of the bucket.

You see, while the federal government is scheduled to soon reinstate the estate tax on the wealth of deceased people, we now learn that it has also been giving money to the dearly departed.

Yes, an internal audit of the Social Security Administration revealed that it paid out more than $40 million to over six thousand dead people.

These benefits were given out weeks, months, years after receiving death certificates. The bureaucracy had been duly notified. And yet it went blithely on, continuing to send monthly checks.

Bureaucratic error. Hey, we all make mistakes. But it’s worth noting that this was an internal audit. Who knows what we’d catch if it were an external audit, with teeth?

Lately, the federal government has been talking over car companies and banks. Now the president and Congress plan to take control of the medical sector of our economy. They tell us they’ll cut medical costs by cutting waste. Yeah, right.

On a cheerier note, we needn’t fear the institution of those so-called “death panels” to cut costs. The way the feds work, there’d be no savings — they’d still be paying for care long after the patients were dead and gone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.