Free Republic

When British Prime Minister Theresa May gave her traditional New Year's speech on December 31, one line -- actually, just one word -- jumped out at me. May spoke of the importance of “taking a balanced approach to government spending, so we get our debt falling but can also invest in the things that matter -- our schools, our police and our precious NHS.” Yes, “precious.” She actually described the National Health Service as precious! Now, one might easily forgive her for describing, say, Britain's finest doctors and nurses as -- oh, I don't know -- how about “treasured”? Or...

The False WWII AnalogyObama's America is more like Attlee's Britain than Truman's America. Since 2009, the example of the economic boom following World War II has been used by Keynesians to justify their record “peacetime” levels of borrowing intended to lift the U.S. out of the doldrums. Indeed, the more the contemporary borrowing fails, the more the vast indebtedness of the war years is invoked to reassure us. On occasion a wry lament follows that if only a spaceship full of dangerous aliens were to appear, we might have the requisite excuse to follow our grandfathers into a new collective...

He was a man of few words and had little time for the media.

LET'S just agree that if you are looking for someone with whom to compare Barack Obama, the mid-20th-century British prime minister Clement Attlee does not come immediately to mind. Some might opt for FDR, some the Messiah, others the Antichrist or, harsher still, Jimmy Carter. Attlee? Not so much. To start with, there's the whole charisma thing. Attlee was the Labour leader who humiliated Winston Churchill in Britain's 1945 election, but that victory (one of the most sweeping in British history) was more dramatic than the victor. No Obama, the new prime minister was shy, understated, and physically unprepossessing. Balding,...

Let’s just agree that if you are looking for someone with whom to compare Barack Obama, the mid-20th-century British prime minister Clement Attlee does not come immediately to mind. Some might opt for FDR, some the Messiah, others the Antichrist or, harsher still, Jimmy Carter. Attlee? Not so much. To start with, there’s the whole charisma thing. Attlee was the Labour leader who humiliated Winston Churchill in Britain’s 1945 election, but that victory (one of the most sweeping in British history) was more dramatic than the victor. No Obama, the new prime minister was shy, understated, and physically unprepossessing. Balding,...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Weapons of mass disinformationBy Richard W. RahnPublished March 21, 2005 If someone advocates an ideology that has contempt for the individual and has caused untold economic misery and the deaths of hundreds of millions at the hands of their governments, what would you think of that person?     The ideology I refer to is, of course, socialism and its numerous variations, including the utopian socialists, the Fabian socialists, the National Socialists, and, naturally, the communists. Socialism is simply an economic system where the government (or collective) owns and controls the means of production. Given that the two...