Free Republic

Brook’s Law echoes van Braun's Law and both show the insanity of the administration’s response to the fragile Obama(doesn’t)care scheme. Then again all sentient beings who can perform their own post-potty cleaning-up operations knew Obama(doesn’t)care was a fiasco in the making. As everyone – including the president – has heard, the health insurance “exchanges” erected by the government to supplement the existing market for health insurance has done nearly nothing. The web sites and back-end software have malfunctioned to the point that people are unable to even discover if they qualify to receive “exchange” insurance, much less buy the stuff....

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2013 to Eugene F. Fama University of Chicago, IL, USA Lars Peter Hansen University of Chicago, IL, USA and Robert J. Shiller Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA "for their empirical analysis of asset prices”.

Political Director of ABC News, Rick Klein pleaded with investors today to tank the stock market in order to “shake things loose” in the GOP ranks. In his ABC’s The Note piece today, Klein seriously proposed a stock sell-off designed for the express purpose of breaking the will of Republicans. When does Wall Street cast its vote? Bipartisan meetings are nice, and new plans that depend on the other side budging certainly can’t hurt at this stage of a standoff. But there may be only one way to jolt the system: SELL. Klein’s rationale: recent talks with beltway strategists suggest the GOP is...

More than 100,000 residents in Switzerland have signed a petition demanding that the government ensure a minimum monthly income of nearly $2,800 (2,500 Swiss francs) for all adults in the country. The 120,000 signatures are enough to formally call a vote in the government over whether or not to approve the “CHF 2,500 monthly for everyone" (Grundeinkommen)” funding proposal. Funding for the proposed measure would come out of the Swiss social insurance system, which already guarantees universal health care coverage for its citizens, along with other benefits designed to uphold the country’s social safety net.

The Cato Institute recently released an updated version of a decades-old study analyzing welfare benefits on a state-by-state basis. The study, The Work vs. Welfare Trade-Off, found that the total value of welfare benefits continues to exceed the income that most recipients would earn from an entry-level job in many states. Since the original version of the Cato study was published in 1995, the total value of welfare benefits increased in 32 states and the District of Columbia, while 18 states saw a decline in the value of benefits. One of the most significant findings in the study is the...

The news is full of it. But most Christians know very little about it. Economics: it’s everywhere, influencing everything — and so rarely understood. Economics for Everybody seeks to remedy that through an insightful and entertaining exploration of the principles, practices, and consequences of economics. Thoroughly unconventional, it links entrepreneurship with lemonade, cartoons with markets, and Charlie Chaplin with supply and demand. If you're confused about economics, this is the place to begin. We not only explain how economics works, we show how economic freedom is directly related to religious freedom; we explore the differences between socialism, interventionism, and free...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Obamacare gives married couples an annual tax of up to $11,028 for being married instead of single In front of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Obama administration argued that Obamacare is a tax.According to the Obamacare calulator, Obamacare places an annual tax on married couples for being married instead of single. The amount of this tax depends upon the ages, incomes, and parental status of the married couple.According to the Obamacare calculator, the extreme case of this tax occurs with a 60-year-old married couple with no children, where the two spouses have identical incomes totaling $62,041...

Here it is, fresh from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: all of American spending in one big color wheel. ~snip~ For the poor, food, clothes, and housing account for more than 60 percent of all spending. The rich have more left over for leisure, insurance, and savings.

An engineer argues there has never been a sound theory of economics, with significant implications for GOP ideology.

There can be no debate about the nation’s anemic economic recovery and its effect on the working poor. While the stock market is soaring again, jobs and wages continue to lag. Democratic leaders and the governor have rightly agreed to raise California’s minimum wage significantly – to $10 over two years. It would increase to $9 on July 1, 2014, and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016. In an economy with a record-high income gap (the top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the nation’s total income last year), such an adjustment is justified and long overdue....

Here's my response to Commander Zer0's verbal assault on reason that took place last night. I realize that our Dear Leader's plans to provide al-Qaeda air cover may not materialize, but keep this in mind: We have a failing dictator who's willing to start world War III to distract the country from his varied scandals and Zimbabwe-like economy. Anything is still possible with this pile of human debris in the White House. Without further ado: *** For the last couple of days, we've been exposed to an endless stream of war propaganda in support of Chairman Obama's Syrian adventure. Without...

Gov. Jerry Brown said Wednesday that he supports raising the minimum wage in California to $10 an hour, urging lawmakers to approve a bill. The measure would raise the minimum hourly wage from $8 to $9 on July 1, 2014, and then to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016.

The American Legislative Exchange Council Center For State Fiscal Reform’s latest publication, Keeping the Promise: State Solutions for Government Pension Reform, offers a solution-based perspective that should be valuable even for high-tax and higher-debt Illinois in its search for Illinois pension reform. Illinois pensions face a liability of at least $97 billion, with some estimates much higher. Gov. Pat Quinn has gone so far as to deny paychecks to the state legislature in attempt to put a more immediate cost on inaction. The governor’s office projected the defined-benefit liability will grow by $5 million per day, an improvement over last...

link only http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-27/why-walmart-will-never-pay-like-costco.html

Ronald Coase, an economist hailed as one of the top 10 greatest economic thinkers of all time, passed away Monday, September 2, 2013, just shy of 103 years of age. Coase was truly a titan in economics, publishing his first article at only 27, and producing fresh and insightful content well into his 100s. A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Coase is one of the founders of both the law and economics and new institutional economics disciplines, as well as one of the seminal thinkers in industrial organization economics and the study of social costs. He was...

On Thursday El Rushbo dedicated well over an hour to the McDonald's minimum wage strikes going on nationwide. During this he takes a call from a man who believes the protesters deserve their demanded 100%(!) wage increase. Putting on his professor's hat, Rush then delivers an Econ 101 lecture that everyone needs to learn (or relearn). The entire discussion is couched within the Democrat left's and particularly Obama's ignorant view of economics and how their destructive (not to mention oppressive and authoritarian) policies are hurting the county, including the very McDonalds workers -- no doubt mostly Obama voters themselves -- who are...

Sometime what you are selling is so awful and useless you can’t even give it away. The Communists who run Vietnam are learning this simple truth up front and personally. They are trying to get young people interested in learning all about the wonderful Communist system they live under but they are just not interested. They are so disinterested in what Marx, Lenin and Barack Obama’s hero Ho Chi Minh had to say that they will not use their precious college years studying their works; even free of charge. Last month Nguyen Tan Dung the head Red decreed that students...

Why is it that natural gas sells in the U.S. for $3.94 per 1,000 cubic feet and in Europe and Japan for $11.60 and $17, respectively? Part of the answer is our huge supply. With high-tech methods of extraction and with discovery of vast gas-rich shale deposits, estimated reserves are about 2.4 quadrillion cubic feet. That translates into more than a 100-year supply of natural gas at current usage rates. What partially explains the high European and Japanese prices is the fact that global natural gas markets are not integrated. Washington has stringent export restrictions on natural gas. Naturally, the...

Our Research Fellow George Ayittey met the Irish rock star Bono in July 2007 during a TED conference. Professor Ayittey was speaking and in knowing that Bono would be in the audience, he explains that “I made a special effort to rip into the foreign aid establishment. . . . Later, Bono said he liked my speech but did not agree with me that foreign aid is not effective in ending poverty. So I gave him a copy of my book, Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Development.” Bono (nee Paul David Hewson) is the lead singer in the rock group...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Movie review: “Elysium” is implausible, because it’s based on a medical device manufacturer that does not employ any salespeople Elysium has too many loud, noisy action scenes, and not enough calm, quiet, reflective scenes of thoughtful contemplation. It didn’t have any lines of dialogue that I can see myself wanting to quote in the future. None of the characters were particularly interesting. And if I was a child, I couldn’t see myself wanting to buy any of the action figures that might be based on this movie.The machine that instantly cures cancer seems perfectly plausible. However,...