Recently Dr. Daniel Craviotto published “A Doctor’s Declaration of Independence.” He has been a practicing physician for more than two decades and knows that the “only thing that matters is the doctor-patient relationship.”

He asks when doctors are going to stand up and reject the mandates and requirements made by bureaucrats who are not in the healing profession. He thinks it is time for the 880,000 licensed physicians to stand up and say they are not going to take it anymore.

For example, he talks about the requirement that doctors use electronic health records. Otherwise they will be penalized with lower reimbursements. He points out the doctors waste precious time filling in unnecessary electronic-record fields just to satisfy a regulatory measure. He says he spends two hours a day dictating and documenting electronic health records so he can be paid and avoid a government audit. He wonders if this is the best use of time for a specialized orthopedic surgeon.

He also laments the fact that Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements have significantly declined and not kept up with inflation. A total knee replacement surgery reimbursement decreased by 68% between 1992 and 2010, based on 1992 dollars.

He concludes that he is tired. He is “tired of the mandates, tired of outside interference, tired of anything that unnecessarily interferes with the way I practice medicine. No other profession would put up with this kind of scrutiny and coercion from outside forces.” It is hard to believe that lawyers and people in other professions would put up with all of this.

Dr. Craviotto guesses that he will probably retire in less than 10 years. Many other doctors have already retired or will retire early because of these bureaucratic headaches. Then where will we be, with few doctors and more Americans expecting treatment?

We shouldn’t be surprised that he and other doctors are ready to declare their independence.

Matt Kibbe with FreedomWorks has a new book out with the provocative title: “Don’t Hurt People, and Don’t Take Their Stuff.” The title is actually part of a list he created that he calls “Rules for Liberty.” Saul Alinsky wrote the book, “Rules for Radicals.” So Matt decided to put together a set of rules that should be applied by freedom-loving people.

1. Don’t hurt people – that rule should be simple enough. Yet we can see how government intrusion into our lives has hurt people. You can look at the surveillance of citizens and the intrusion into our privacy. You can look at the negative impact Obamacare is having on so many people who were happy with their previous health insurance policy.

2. Don’t take people’s stuff – we should expect government to respect life, liberty, and property. Matt Kibbe reminds us of a time when property rights “were sacrosanct, where promises you make to others through contracts are strictly enforced, and where the rule of law is simple and transparent.”

3. Take responsibility – we shouldn’t wait for someone to solve a problem. Liberty is an individual responsibility. We should help our neighbors and be a positive influence in the community.

4. Work for it – liberty is not only a responsibility but it is also a weight. We need to work to be successful. Work also allows us to pursue our dreams and goals and feel the success of achieving them.

5. Mind your own business – free people live and let live. They don’t demand that others always agree with them and do not make demands on their freedom. Many in government don’t believe in a “live and let live” philosophy.

6. Fight the power – power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. An unlimited government is a danger to freedom and to the individual. The American people have a right to check on the decisions made by their elected individuals and stand up to immoral and wrongful decisions.

Matt Kibbe’s book is a manual and manifesto for freedom.

Zero tolerance policies are ruining the lives of good kids. When a school overreacts, sometimes it hurts the lives and futures of students who need school officials to exercise some common sense.

Consider the case of high school senior Jordan Wiser. The school found a folding pocketknife in his car and sent him to jail. He was also enrolled in the Army’s Future Soldier Training System program but was discharged pending a “not guilty” verdict or dropped charges. I might mention that he had the knife because he uses it in his EMT training.

John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute was on my radio program. He believes the school overreacted and completely mishandled the situation. He met Jordan and can vouch for the fact that he is a good kid. The school officials should have sat down with him and his parents and obtained a frame of reference. Now his dream of serving in the Army may be dashed.

Christian Stanfield is a 15-year-old with special needs who was bullied repeatedly by students. He decided to use his school-issued iPad to record the abuse he experienced in math class. His mother brought it to the principal. Christian was charged and found guilty of felony wiretapping and disorderly conduct.

Students aren’t the only ones affected by misguided zero tolerance policies. Doug Bartlett teaches second graders in Chicago. In one class he displayed several tools, including wrenches, screwdrivers, a box cutter, a pocketknife, and pliers. These were visual aids for a “tool discussion” which is required in the curriculum. When not in use, the tools were secured in a toolbox on a high shelf out of the reach of students. Nevertheless, he was put under investigation for “possessing, carrying, storing, or using a weapon” and received a four-day suspension without pay.

These are just a few examples of zero tolerance policies that have been administered without common sense. Some of the charges were later reversed, but it illustrates some of the insanity of these policies and the need for reform.

Attempts to pass legislation requiring voter identification are often met with skepticism about whether voter fraud actually takes place. The attorney general argues that voter fraud is rare and does not warrant voter ID laws. The president in a recent speech cited statistics and concluded that charges of voter fraud are bogus.

Robert Popper has served as the deputy chief of the voting section of the Civil Right Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In a recent op-ed, he examined the two studies from which the president drew his statistics.

The first report was issued by News21, an Arizona State University project, and concluded that there were only a handful of in-person voter impersonation cases. However, if you go to the website of the study, you find that the students who sent public records requests to state and federal officials didn’t receive lots of responses. And of the responses they received, “some vital piece of information that had been requested specifically” was missing.

The second study cited by the president documented that only 40 voters “were indicted for fraud” in a three-year-period. This was drawn from a news release about federal cases and did not include prosecutions in any of the 50 state court systems for violations of state voting laws.

Let’s also acknowledge something fundamentally wrong about judging voter fraud by counting criminal proceedings. Robert Popper reminds us that for any crime “convictions are a fraction of prosecution, which are a faction of investigations, which are a fraction of known offenses, which are, in turn, a fraction of committed crimes.”

Here’s a statistic the president should have cited. The Pew Research Center published a 2012 report that found 1.8 million deceased registrants were listed as active voters and 2.75 million voters had active registrations in more than one state. Those are millions of opportunities for voter fraud.

Ron Prosor is Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. He recently wrote an op-ed on “The Middle East War on Christians.” He notes that the Muslim nations in the Middle East are now doing to Christians what they did to the Jews in the past.

He says, “The Middle East may be the birthplace of three monotheistic religions, but some Arab nations appear bent on making it the burial ground for one of them.” Christian communities could be found in the Arab world for centuries. Even at the turn of the 20th century, Christians made up 26 percent of the population of the Middle East. Today that figure is less than 10 percent and declining. Extremist governments are driving away the Christian communities that have lived in the Middle East since the religion of Islam was born.

Christians are losing their lives, liberties, businesses, and churches across the Middle East. Those that survive and can relocate are seeking refuge in neighboring countries often to find they are not welcome there as regimes change. Over the past ten years, two-thirds of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have been driven from their homes. Many settled in Syria. Now they are leaving Syria. The Syrian Christian population is only a third of what it was a few decades ago.

Each year Open Doors ministry publishes a list of the ten most oppressive countries for Christians. This year I noted that nine of the ten were Muslim-majority nations. The only one that was not was North Korea.

Ron Prosor acknowledges that the so-called “justice system” in many Islamic nations “is not particularly just for Arab citizens, but it is uniquely oppressive for Christians.” Christians are prosecuted for the “crime” of converting someone to Christianity. Many are subject to laws involving dhimmitude. Muslims in these countries extort the Christians. Either they must pay the dhimmi tax or “face the sword.”

I congratulate the Israeli ambassador for reminding us that there is a war on Christians in the Middle East.

Six years ago, the average woman in the United States had 2.1 children in her lifetime. This is what many demographers call “the golden number.” To sustain a population in any country, women on average need to produce 2.1 children. If that number is higher, the population increases. If that number is lower, the population decreases.

Lou Dobbs devotes an entire chapter in his book, Upheaval, to the subject of “Demographics and Destiny Disturbed.” He was on my radio program and talked about the fact that the fertility rate in America has now declined. He also lamented the abortions of over 60 million unborn. These are sobering statistics.

But if you think America is facing a problem, consider Japan with a fertility rate of 1.39. It is imploding. By the end of this century, Japan’s population will be less than half of its current population. Japanese consumers are buying more adult diapers than baby diapers. A Japanese foreign ministry last year urged the elderly to “hurry up and die.” That is a remarkable statement given Japan’s past veneration of the elderly.

Europe also faces incredible challenges because of declining fertility rates. Greece has a fertility rate (1.4) equal to Japan’s fertility rate. It will be impossible to fund the Greek welfare state when the population is imploding. Greece is not alone. The fertility rate of other countries like Germany (1.42) and Italy (1.41) is similar to the fertility rate in Greece. Russia has been trying to encourage couples to have children because its fertility rate is only 1.6.

China is yet another example. The One-Child Policy of that country assured “that as many as 400 million Chinese children were not born.” I have talked with a number of experts on my radio program in the past that documented the dire consequences to anyone in China who violated the policy. China’s population will also be imploding and that will have economic consequences.

Declining fertility rates illustrate once again the demography is destiny.

Lou Dobbs was on my radio program recently to talk about his new book, Upheaval. One of the themes in his book is how disconnected members of Congress are from the rest of us.

Let’s start with their personal wealth. Nearly half (47%) of all members of Congress are millionaires. Sheila Krumholz at the Center for Responsive Politics says, “Few Americans enjoy the same financial cushions maintained by most members of Congress—or the same access to market-altering information that could yield personal, financial gains.” That last point is also significant. Lou Dobbs and I talked about the number of men and women who came to Congress without great financial resources yet left as multimillionaires.

Members of Congress also reward their financial friends. One study found that of stimulus grants and contracts awarded by Congress, the Washington, D.C. region received almost ten times more money per capita than the national average.

Of course it isn’t just members of Congress that seem out of touch with America. Here’s another number of Lou Dobbs: 459,016. That is the number of federal workers who earn more than $100,000 per year. “Proportionally, that amounts to about one in every five federal workers. By comparison, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary in the United States at large was $40,144.”

Consider this number: 5.5 percent. That was the unemployment rate in the Washington, D.C. region in early 2012. In fact, the unemployment rate was less than 4 percent for workers with a bachelor’s degree. By contrast the national unemployment rate at that same period of time was 8.2 percent.

Government is a booming business, while the rest of us around the country are struggling to makes ends meet. It is not surprising that most members of Congress seem to be paying more attention to big business, big labor, and various lobbyists. They don’t seem to be paying attention to America’s middle class.