Free Republic

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...

North Korean parents 'eating their own children' after being driven mad by hunger in famine-hit pariah state A starving man in North Korea has been executed after murdering his two children for food, reports from inside the secretive state claim. A 'hidden famine' in the farming provinces of North and South Hwanghae is believed to have killed up to 10,000 people and there are fears that incidents of cannibalism have risen. The grim story is just one to emerge as residents battle starvation after a drought hit farms and shortages were compounded by party officials confiscating food. Undercover reporters from...

Faced with the high cost of caring for smokers and overeaters, experts say society must grapple with a blunt question: Instead of trying to penalize them and change their ways, why not just let these health sinners die? Annual health care costs are roughly $96 billion for smokers and $147 billion for the obese, the government says. These costs accompany sometimes heroic attempts to prolong lives, including surgery, chemotherapy and other measures. But despite these rescue attempts, smokers tend to die 10 years earlier on average, and the obese die five to 12 years prematurely, according to various researchers’ estimates....

When will America's foreign enemies begin to take advantage of the animosity that many Americans are harboring towards their government? It would seem to me that it's not a winning proposition to go up against ATF swat teams, with even the best assault weapons when they arrive in front of your home and kick down your door. If however, their arrival was greeted with an RPG provided by Iran, or some other country who would like to see America devolve into a country in the grips of a civil war. I believe many would like to overthrow the current government,...

Shortly after Hugo Chávez won his first election as Venezuelan president in December 1998, a lawyer from the western state of Barinas, which was then governed by Chávez's father, delivered a prescient warning to Newsweek magazine: "Venezuelans are dreaming of a savior, but Chávez is a dictator. People don't know what they are getting."  More than 14 years later, a cancer-stricken Chávez is reportedly near death, but his autocratic legacy is very much alive. Venezuela long ago ceased to be a real democracy: The ruling regime effectively controls the Supreme Court (which in 2004 was expanded and packed with Chávez allies), the National Assembly...

Biden: W.H. readies 19 executive actions on guns By: Reid J. Epstein January 14, 2013 06:49 PM EST The White House has identified 19 executive actions for President Barack Obama to move unilaterally on gun control, Vice President Joe Biden told a group of House Democrats on Monday, the administration’s first definitive statements about its response to last month’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Later this week, Obama will formally announce his proposals to reduce gun violence, which are expected to include renewal of the assault weapons ban, universal background checks and prohibition of high-capacity magazine clips. But...

Biden: Obama Considering 'Executive Order' to Deal With Guns "The president is going to act," said Biden, giving some comments to the press before a meeting with victims of gun violence. "There are executives orders, there's executive action that can be taken. We haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required." Biden said that this is a moral issue and that "it's critically important that we act." Biden talked also about taking responsible...

CARACAS, Venezuela — Hugo Chavez’s fervent followers still assemble in the capital’s main public square, decked in the bright red of their leader’s movement, to chant revolutionary songs that envisage the president leading the country far into the future. But Chavez, who has dominated public life here since the late 1990s, is nowhere to be seen. He no longer gives his trademark bombastic speeches, nor does he hold forth on television like a game-show host. On Sunday, he remained in Cuba, where he has been for nearly a month, presumably convalescing after undergoing surgery to remove what he called “some...

H.J.Res.15 - Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.

True to form, the New York Times saw out 2012 by publishing another apology for dictatorship. In his op-ed, Louis Michael Seidman -- Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University - argues that the Constitution should be abandoned.  The suggestion is so preposterous that it is tempting to dismiss the article altogether, but to do so would be to miss some very revealing implications.  The article is not so much a suggestion of constitutional reform as an open call for dictatorship. Seidman begins by blaming the current governmental crisis, incredibly, on "obedience to the Constitution," which he describes as containing...

Morsi of Egypt is speaking LIVE NOW. Can someone please translate or explain what he is saying? Thanks! http://www.livestream.com/ontveglive

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi made several decrees Thursday that will shape the country’s constitution and, he says, safeguard its “revolutionary” future. They include a ruling that none of his decisions can be overturned by any authority. Morsi gave the Constituent Assembly a two month deadline to finish drafting a new constitution, ruling that no authority may dissolve it until the country's defining document is completed. He further ruled that no authority may dissolve the Shura Council, the upper house of Egypt's parliament. In a move likely to bring criticism that the Egyptian president is inappropriately expanding his powers, he also...

CAIRO — Egypt's Islamist President Mohamed Morsi assumed sweeping powers on Thursday, drawing criticism that he is seeking to become a "new pharaoh" and raising questions about the gains of last year's uprising which ousted Hosni Mubarak. The move is a blow to the pro-democracy movement that toppled the long-time president, himself derided by many as a pharaoh, and raises concerns that Islamists will be further ensconced in power. Opposition forces denounced the declaration as a "coup" and called for nationwide protests on Friday. "The president can issue any decision or measure to protect the revolution," according to a decree...

Karl Marx was asked once how he could justify advocating a political system of slavery for the individual, which is what socialism is. He replied that, socialism is not slavery; it is a "new kind of freedom." As all perceptive students of history know, the intellectuals of Europe bought into such Alice in Wonderland sophistry and plunged into the twentieth century nightmare of collectivist tyranny. But unfortunately so did American intellectuals about 30 years later when the Progressives of Woodrow Wilson's era established the Creature from Jekyl Island to usher in centralized government banking and the progressive income tax to...

Students banging pots, and shouting "fraud", gathered at a busy Caracas intersection on Monday night, to protest election results in the tropical country.

The US Department of Homeland Security this week issued a call for unmanned systems makers to participate in a program that will ultimately determine their safety and performance for use in first responder, law enforcement and border security situations. In a twist that will certainly raise some eyebrows, the program's results of the ironically named program -- The Robotic Aircraft for Public Safety (RAPS) -- will remain unavailable to the public, which considering how involved the actual public may be with these drones is shall we say, unfortunate. Specifically the DHS says: "The information within each test report will be...

Sean Penn campaigns in Venezuela — for Hugo Chavez Human Events- Coupled with Chavez's own 14-year record of intimidating political enemies, denouncing U.S. opponents, and forging alliances

Geopolitics: What do Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, Gulf oil sheiks and President Obama have in common? They all want to halt the U.S. energy revolution in fracking. No wonder so many of them are endorsing Obama. Presidential candidates always attract a few embarrassing endorsements, but the numbers of rogue dictators lining up to call for Obama's reelection is striking. Obama "is an honest man who really wants to change much for the better," cooed Russia's President Vladimir Putin to RT state television after hurling verbal thunderbolts at Mitt Romney. It was "widely viewed as Putin's most direct endorsement of Obama,"...

I missed this piece from Steven Rattner (who was a key figure in the Obama auto bailout) when it appeared in the NY Times a couple weeks ago. Tacitly acknowledging that costs are going to soar out of sight, Rattner opens with this frank admission: “We need death panels.” Jonah Goldberg wonders: When can Sarah Palin expect her letter of apology?” Rattner goes on to back away from “death panels,” but instead uses the R-word: rationing. Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the...

Let's talk about actual economic reality. At this point, everything the government is doing – and not just the US government but governments everywhere − is not only the wrong thing but exactly the opposite of the right thing. They're passing more laws, raising taxes, creating more currency and incurring more debt. They should be doing the opposite. We're currently still in the eye of the storm. Their actions guarantee that when we go back into the hurricane − the trailing edge of the hurricane − it's going to be much worse and will last much longer than what we...