Free Republic

A top executive at White Castle cooked up a spicy retort on Wednesday to calls by some fast-food workers to raise the minimum wage to $15 a hour from $7.25, arguing such an increase would force the hamburger chain to close nearly half of its locations and lay off thousands of workers. "To more than double the federally mandated starting wage wouldn't be bad for White Castle, it would be absolutely catastrophic," Jamie Richardson, vice president of White Castle, told CNBC's "Closing Bell" on Wednesday. Such an increase would force the closure of more than 200 of its 406 locations...

When Montecore, one of two white tigers in the Las Vegas act of Siegfried and Roy, turned and almost killed Roy on stage, the reaction was that the tame and complacent beast had gone berserk. Comedian Chris Rock was nearer the mark: "That tiger ain't go crazy; that tiger went tiger." Seems our Asian tiger is going tiger as well. Sharply escalating its clash with Japan over ownership of the Senkaku Islands, Beijing has established an air defense identification zone over the islands and a huge stretch of the East China Sea. Before entering its ADIZ, says Beijing, all...

As America struggles with high unemployment and record inequality, everyone is offering competing solutions to the problem. In this war of words (and classes), one thing has been repeated so often that many people now regard it as fact. "Rich people create the jobs." Specifically, by starting and directing America's companies, entrepreneurs and rich investors create the jobs that sustain everyone else. This statement is usually invoked to justify cutting taxes on entrepreneurs and investors. If only we reduce those taxes and regulations, the story goes, entrepreneurs and investors can be incented to build more companies and create more jobs....

Originally posted at Monty Pelerin's World, “Capitalism is not things; it is a mentality.” So stated Ludwig von Mises in a talk in mid 1952 in a series of lectures entitled Marxism Unmasked which he gave at the San Francisco library. Mises provided examples that illustrated this mentality or its lack. One pertained to India (my emboldening): Nehru [Jawajarlal Nehru, 1889 - 1964] has been quoted as saying ”We want to give every encouragement to private industry.We won’t expropriate private businesses for at least ten years — perhaps not even that soon.” You cannot expect people to invest if you...

There was a strong trend of states cutting taxes this year, with 18 states passing significant tax cuts into law during the 2013 legislative session. With one-third of the United States cutting taxes, it is clear economic growth has become a top priority for states that want to dig out of the dismal economy that followed the recession. The 2013 tax cuts range from a nearly complete overhaul of a state’s tax code to a few small changes. The year’s biggest tax cut was enacted in North Carolina as part of a comprehensive tax reform package. Ohio also passed major...

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milton_FriedmanThere are four ways in which you can spend money. 1) You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. 2) Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. 3) Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself,...

Our nation’s founders incorporated the concept of individual property rights — including intellectual property rights — into the Constitution because they knew that these rights spur innovation and help promote economic growth. However, patent assertion entities (PAEs), otherwise known as “patent trolls,” inhibit the innovation and economic growth that patents typically foster. Even more alarming, with the creation of government-sponsored patent trolls (GSPTs) — which are financially backed by a national government — patent trolls have gone global. Patent trolls, which can either be companies or government-sponsored organizations, are entities that buy large patent portfolios — not to use the...

What is socialism if not a journey into the mind and soul of a quivering little boy hiding in a big boy suit? His jacket and tie mask a brooding fear of failure and a yearning for validation that all is wrong with the world, while they also drive his own self-righteous laziness.

It seems that every day new revelations emerge regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Supporters of the ACA are now starting to distance themselves from it as we hear reports of insurance companies dropping subscribers, households subscribing on the exchanges in unexpectedly low numbers and insurance costs higher than promised. Even the liberal New York Times ran an op-ed piece entitled “Obamacare, Failing Ahead of Schedule.” Earlier this week President Obama vowed that, “I’ve run my last political campaign, but I’ve got one more campaign in me and that’s making sure that this [APA] law works.” The goal of the...

Did you know that the United States lost more jobs during the 2001 recession than during the Great Recession? It's true. In the worst three quarters of the 2001 recession the U.S. economy lost 26.1 million jobs. In the worst three quarters of the Great Recession, the economy lost 25.1 million jobs. The reason the Great Recession was remarkable was not because of the job losses. It was because the spike in job losses coupled with a lack of job gains. In the monthly employment releases, people are told how many jobs exist in the U.S. and whether the economy...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Why did Democrats give Obamacare an annual marriage tax of up to $11,028 per couple? 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 per year....

'SeaTac has just volunteered to conduct an economic experiment on itself.' Nov. 10--SEATAC voters' apparent acceptance of the $15 minimum wage has pumped up political excitement for a $15 wage in Seattle. So has the strong showing of Kshama Sawant, who made the $15 minimum a centerpiece in her campaign against Seattle City Councilmember Richard Conlin. But there is more to this than activist adrenaline. Fifteen dollars is 61 percent higher than the 2014 minimum wage for Washington, $9.32, which itself is the highest minimum wage of any state. This page opposed the $15 wage because of the possible economic...

In his parting act, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has decided to continue printing some $85 billion per month (6 percent of GDP per year) and spend those dollars on government bonds and, in the process, keep interest rates low, stimulate investment, and reduce unemployment. Trouble is, interest rates have generally been rising, investment remains very low, and unemployment remains very high. Bernanke’s dangerous policy hasn’t worked and should be ended. Since 2007 the Fed has increased the economy's basic supply of money (the monetary base) by a factor of four! That's enough to sustain, over a relatively short period...

On Tuesday a ballot measure to raise income taxes on Coloradans to raise funds for increased education spending failed. In fact, the measure, Amendment 66, didn’t just fail–it went down in flames. The measure was defeated by a 32 percent margin. This major defeat was in spite of the fact that the measure’s backers outspent the opponents by a large margin, raising $10 million to support the initiative, including a $1 million each from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Bill and Melinda Gates. Amendment 66 would have eliminated Colorado’s flat rate income tax of 4.63 percent in favor of...

“If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.” ~ Better Business Bureau - By: Larry Walker, Jr. -According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) there are 7.2 million uninsured Americans ages 18 to 34 years, living in single-person households in the 34 states. And, of that total, 2.9 million are eligible to buy health insurance on either federal or state partnership insurance marketplaces. And among those 2.9 million, 1.3 million, or 46%, could pay less than $50 a month for a “Bronze Plan”.Hmmm. That sounds, well, too good to be true. Let’s see...

The apparatchiks, you see, are different from you and me… As the Government Shutdown of October 2013 fades away into the history books, there are two lessons that the American Left desperately wants the country to forget. Oh, the Left is fine with American voters retaining a vague memory of the event – “The government was closed; people didn’t get their checks, it was the Republicans’ fault, of course” – but the Left doesn’t want every aspect remembered. They certainly don’t want the really important lessons to be retained. They’re praying that we forget, as soon as possible. So, while...

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...