Free Republic

Communism, socialism, progessivism -- it's really just 'cronyism'. And so is Keynesian economics -- just the same trick with a different name. Famines are the most brutal kind of math and nearly impossible to hide. And the mathematics of famines proves something time and again: If you don't have a merit-based economy then your natural resources rarely mean anything. If you don't know about the Pilgrims' communism-induced famine just tune into Rush Limbaugh before Thanksgiving. Venezuela is the most recent example. Up until very recently its farms were privately owned. Not anymore. Recent headlines [*a*] 1. Venezuela Is Collapsing and...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The WikiLeaks dump today has something incredible in it and one of the things I like to try to do each and every day is take the complex and make it understandable. Sometimes it's challenging to do because in order to take something complex and make it understandable, the people to whom you're speaking have to have at least a quasi-foundation of understanding of the subject matter. And I think in this case most every one of you do. The specific leak to which I'm referring is a series of emails that show the absolute connection between...

Hillary’s hybrid ‘Clinton State-Foundation’ is a national disgrace Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” says the frequently delusional Blanche Dubois near the bitter end of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire. Ah yes, kind strangers. It’s a playwright’s loaded line. Put bluntly, Miss Blanche may practice intermittent prostitution. According to rumors, before her New Orleans travails, Blanche lost her Mississippi hotel digs because her scandalous associations with menfolk tarnished the joint’s reputation. This naughty gossip, Blanche’s louche behavior, her iffy relationship with what we might call...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought to arrange Pentagon and State Department consulting contracts for her daughter’s friend, prompting concerns of federal ethics rules violations. Clinton in 2009 arranged meetings between Jacqueline Newmyer Deal, a friend of Chelsea Clinton and head of the defense consulting group Long Term Strategy Group, with Pentagon officials that involved contracting discussions, according to emails from Clinton’s private server made public recently by the State Department. Clinton also tried to help Deal win a contract for consulting work with the State Department’s director of policy planning, according to the emails. Deal is a close...

illary Clinton And Wall Street: Financial Industry May Control Retirement Savings In A Clinton Administration BY DAVID SIROTA @DAVIDSIROTA AND AVI ASHER-SCHAPIRO ON 10/19/16 AT 12:50 AM Blackstone's Tony James: America's Not Great at Saving While Hillary Clinton has spent the presidential campaign saying as little as possible about her ties to Wall Street, the executive who some observers say could be her Treasury Secretary has been openly promoting a plan to give financial firms control of hundreds of billions of dollars in retirement savings. The executive is Tony James, president of the Blackstone Group. The investment colossus is most...

Economists from Moody’s Analytics write articles saying that Hillary’s economic policies are better for the economy than Trump’s policies. These articles come can come from Mark Zandi, Don White or in this case, Jeff Benjamin. Whenever any article comes from Moody's analytics a footnote should show that a major shareholder of Moody's is Warren Buffett who campaigns for Hillary. The image they project is that Moody's is an objective, independent source. Zandi is always trotted out as the independent economist whenever Obama or Hillary need an economist to support their policies.

It’s not good to get into personal appearances especially when, like me, you live in a glass house. But I believe what Brit Hume was hinting at in regard to Hillary’s appearance the other night was that she was so made up and rigidly coiffed she could have been prepared for the debate by Don Corleone’s undertaker Amerigo. Scary, like one of those creepy clown dolls which move from the couch to the chair when the lights go off is scary. But scarier is her pledge to create five million new jobs. Because she doesn’t mean what it sounds like...

At an event held in northern Michigan on Aug. 4, Gov. Rick Snyder announced that he and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne would sign a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in promoting the automotive industries of Michigan and Ontario. This type of selective government meddling in the economy is a bad idea and should be avoided. It effectively amounts to crony capitalism, which Oxford Dictionaries defines as an “economic system characterized by close, mutually advantageous relationships between business leaders and government officials.” Crony capitalism has been justifiably denounced by a diverse array of scholars, associations and politicians. These cozy relationships are...

Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton urged Mylan to voluntarily slash the prices of its products while promising that, once she’s elected, her “plan to address exorbitant drug price hikes like these” will be finally implemented. This is a particularly empty promise considering Mylan has donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation, which was recently revealed to be peddling influence in exchange for cash. Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) are also pressuring the manufacturer to disclose more about its pricing. Even Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) — whose own daughter, Heather Bresch, serves as Mylan’s CEO — weighed...

Although the Chamber may present itself as the champion of small businesses, it essentially functions as a money laundry for the world’s largest multi-national corporations, who want to keep their political activity at arm’s length. The Chamber’s $85 million lobbying budget in 2015 dwarfs all others in D.C., and that doesn’t include the over $35 million it spent on political ads in both the 2012 and 2014 election cycles. That money has almost always gone directly into supporting Republicans and trying to unseat Democrats. In an interview with The Intercept after her remarks Thursday night, Lim said she could not...

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) convened a needed Task Force on Reducing Regulatory Burdens as part of his legislative agenda, "A Better Way." The Speaker and his colleagues who worked on the task force have rightly identified the massive regulatory burden imposed by federal bureaucrats as an obstacle to economic growth and a distortion of our constitutional form of government. That is why it is baffling that Ryan has failed to bring regulatory reform legislation that recently passed the Senate to the floor of the House for a vote. The tale is one of catfish and courage. The catfish you...

Cronyism is the ugly marriage between special interest groups and politicians, which results in an abuse of the government's power to grant special privileges to a few winners -- for example, unfairly preventing competition or doling out subsidies and bailouts at the expense of taxpayers. Though cronyism is always outrageous, the way cronies go about achieving their goals is sometimes oddly funny. Case in point: the government's changing the definition of catfish to classify the fish as -- wait for it -- meat, not seafood. As Patrick Mustain reports in Scientific American, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., included an amendment in...

Cronyism in Energy Production “Diablo Canyon produces twice as much power as all of California’s solar panels, 24 percent more than all of its wind, and 40 times more than its largest solar farm. Also, Diablo Canyon provides power to 3 million Californians on a patch of land the size of three football fields. Achieving the equivalent from a solar farm would require 145 times more land; from wind, 500 times more.”—Michael Shellenberger, Breakthrough Institute co-founder, and Peter Raven, former Missouri Botanical Gardens head The announcement last week from PG&E that it was closing Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, rudely...

Last month, news came down the pike from the Harvard Business Review that should bring despair to the hearts of any honest defender of capitalism. As reported by American Enterprise Institute (AEI) blogger James Pethokoukis, the Harvard story, authored by Boston University economist James Bessen, found that growing corporate profitability is increasingly coming from investments not in benevolent, market-friendly costs such as research and development, but rather in augmented lobbying to shut out competition. In short, it is now more profitable to use Washington to stop people from building something new than to actually build it yourself.If a more devastating...

Conflict of interest disclosure reports filed by top federal officials were removed from public view by the Obama administration in recent months, a move that government transparency and accountability advocates condemn as a major setback. The Office of Government Ethics (OGE) reports are the primary tool that watchdog journalists, political activists and interested voters can use to guard against presidential appointees using their positions to enrich themselves or others.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.—Milton Friedman The story of the 340B discount drug program is a classic example of a government program that has been hijacked. Established by the Veterans Healthcare Act of 1992, 340B was intended to give veterans and the indigent discounted drugs. Pharmaceutical companies could sell through to government veterans programs but had to offer a small amount of drugs at costs to help poor and indigent vets. According to the program’s requirements, covered entities must not resell or otherwise transfer 340B drugs to...

resident Obama is a cronyism machine. No administration in our history has done more to punish its enemies and reward its friends. In fact, while engaging in rank identity politics - another Divider-Not-Uniter moment in seven-plus years full of them - the president himself said exactly this: “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”Cronyism candor from the commander in chief. And this promise he has kept. On steroids.But three more of the latest examples are some unequal-protection-before-the-law fiats from the president’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Except...

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/04/why-democrats-are-becoming-the-party-of-the-1-percent

Did you see that Sen. Bernie Sanders released his income taxes?....well, his 2014 income taxes, anyway. He did it around 7 p.m. on a Friday night, on the same day that the Democratic presidential hopeful was making international headlines by speaking at the Vatican and meeting Pope Francis, for at least a handshake. In journalism, releasing information at that off hour is what we call "a Friday news dump" -- usually an attempt to bury bad news. That's weird, because if I were handling PR for the Bernie Sanders campaign, I'd be shouting the news from the Green Mountain-tops. They...

A blogger recently complained that I (along with my fellow bloggers from George Mason University's Department of Economics) "seem to be shills for industry." This lazy accusation is as familiar as it is mistaken, for if I were truly a shill for industry ... • I'd be wealthy, raking in many more dollars than I now take in from my job as a professor at a state university. • I would not have come by my strong preference for freedom and free markets when I was still an undergraduate at Nicholls State University in south Louisiana. Corporations are not known...