Americans already face a $1.8 trillion regulatory burden. These heavy costs are passed on by businesses to consumers, who spend almost a quarter of their annual income complying with regulations often approved executive-level agencies, which have effectively become the fourth branch of the federal government.

Hours after the new members of the 114th Congress were sworn in on Tuesday, Rep. Thomas Massie reintroduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act (H.R. 24), which, if passed, would require the United States' central bank to open certain information to the Government Accountability Office, currently excluded from audits.

Today's vote for Speaker of the House is about much more than who will lead the lower chamber over the next two years. It's also about the future of the limited government, the principles on which Republicans run but often seem to cast aside when they're in power. All one needs to do is look to the not so distant past to find examples.

The House of Representatives may be under Republican control, but it lacks any semblance of principled leadership. In fact, fiscally conservative and libertarian-leaning members -- the ideas wing of the GOP -- have faced an increasingly hostile environment under Republican leadership, one in which they're treated as obstacles rather than allies to advance the limited government policies that Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and his team purportedly believe.

The National Security Agency's vast spying apparatus has been a tremendous hurdle for the United States' still-burgeoning tech industry. Many lawmakers on Capitol Hill are, however, unconcerned with the economic impact of these surveillance programs, making it difficult for meaningful reforms to work their way through Congress.

Before the initial ObamaCare open enrollment period, the Obama administration emphasized the need for millennials -- young people between the ages of 18 and 34 -- to sign up for health plans available on the exchanges. Health insurance companies need diversity in their risk pools to offset costs, because older and sicker people tend to utilize their coverage more often than the young and healthy.

One of the big arguments for ObamaCare is that the law has mechanisms in place that control healthcare costs, or at least that's what Americans have been told countless times by President Barack Obama and others. They've seized on recent reports of the slowdown in healthcare spending, frequently asserting that the 2010 law is responsible. In reality, the looming effects of the Great Recession is the main reason why healthcare spending has risen at a slower pace.

ObamaCare's individual mandate and bailouts aren't enough for the health insurance industry. The looming expiration of the two-year Medicaid payment increase has, once again, put health insurers on the same side as President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, who want to extend the payments to doctors.

Roughly a month before videos surfaced in which he disparaged American voters and bragged about deceptive tactics used to ram ObamaCare through Congress, Jonathan Gruber, the controversial MIT economist paid nearly $400,000 to help craft the law, appeared on a panel with several other healthcare policy experts to talk about its progress and the continuing debate on healthcare reform.

The Obama administration continues boast of the rise in Medicaid enrollees. Just before Christmas, for instance, Cindy Mann, deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, hailed as a "milestone achievement" the addition of 9.7 million Americans to Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) since October 2013.