Free Republic

When I graduated high school, in 1969, a $20 bill had about as much value as a $100 bill today.  Inflation has taken a toll.  In 1969, $500 and $1,000 bills were still in reasonably common circulation.  They had been issued up until 1945.  With the turn toward ever increasing government snooping and tracking of financial transactions, the bills were taken out of circulation with an executive order by President Richard Nixon. It is long past due to bring the $500 bill back into common use. The European Union issues 500 Euro bills. Cash is useful for preserving privacy...

iPhone prices overseas tanking in response to Justice Department ignoring the free speech clause in the Constitution and insisting Apple write code for them to unlock iPhones.

For everyone but the top 1 percent of earners, the American economy is broken. Since the 1980s, there has been a widening disconnect between the lives lived by ordinary Americans and the statistics that say our prosperity is growing. Despite the setback of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy more than doubled in size during the last three decades while middle-class incomes and buying power have stagnated.... (yet) for too many families, the American Dream is becoming more a historical memory than an achievable reality. These facts do not just highlight the issues of inequality and the growing power of...

This Atlantic story reveals how Americans lived 100 years ago. (HT Warren Smith) By the standards of a middle-class American today, that lifestyle was poor, inconvenient, dreary, and dangerous. (Only a few years later - in 1924 - the 16-year-old son of a sitting U.S. president would die of an infected blister that the boy got on his toe while playing tennis on the White House grounds.) So here's a question that I've asked in one form or another on earlier occasions, but that is so probing that I ask it again: What is the minimum amount of money that...

Billionaire Charles Koch’s political network plans to spend hundreds of millions to back Republicans in 2016, but he has penned an article agreeing with Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders about an economic system he calls “rigged to help the privileged few.” “He believes we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities . . . I agree with him.” But Koch offered a solution Sanders was sure to reject — stop...

During the last Republican debate the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Stassel challenged Donald Trump on the projected revenue from his proposed tax plan. In essence Stassel claimed some economists doubted the growth factor Mr. Trump projects in his tax proposal. In a sixty second response time, it is factually impossible to explain something we have discussed here before. Specifically, one of the larger hurdles Trump faces is a need to re-educate an entire generation on a fundamentally new vision of the U.S. economy. A return to a goods- based manufacturing and industry driven economic model. Interestingly, many people have referenced...

Echoing the recent sentiments of Steve Forbes, this week Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz told a group in New Hampshire: "Money is ... a unit of measurement. So, the reason why we see these rapid oscillations in commodities markets, it's because of unstable currencies. And it's why I think we should look at going toward rules-based money supply, ideally tied to gold, so you have stability." Perhaps this will trigger another flood of disagreement in the mainstream press, such as the recent New York Times item which reported that 40 out of 40 "leading economists" said that a gold standard...

America's abysmal 0.7% economic growth during the fourth quarter of 2015 meant the annual growth rate was an anemic 2.4% … and average annual growth for the six-year Obama era a pathetic 2.2 percent.This is "dead last compared to six other recession recoveries since 1960," Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore points out. They averaged a robust 4.0% while the Reagan era recovery averaged a "sizzling" 4.8% over six years. That means the Obama recovery lost $1.8 trillion (in constant 2009 money) that would have been pumped into the economy under an average recovery, and$2.8 trillion under a Reagan-style rebound, Moore says, citing a congressional...

How many calories do you consume each day? If you answered something like "2,000" or "3,000," you're kidding yourself. You consume about 60 to 90 times that many. True, you probably eat only 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day, but most of the calories you consume aren't from food. They're the energy you use when you turn on a light or computer, drive your car, use your cell phone, or do anything else requiring energy. If you're like the average American, you consume about 186,000 calories a day, and over 98% of it is machine energy. It serves you, minute...

Peter Drucker wrote the first version of this book during Hitler's rise to power. Most explanations for the rise of fascism focused on political reasons or economic ones, while Drucker explains the social movements that made leaders like Mussolini and Hitler possible. It also explains what is (and isn't) fascism, how they hobble their own economies, and the social warpage they create. Peter Drucker updated "The End of Economic Man" in the 1960s, seeing horrifying parallels between the 1960s activism and the 1930s. And while history does not repeat, it rhymes - and this book explains the social trends that...

Michael Hiltzik, a columnist and Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote an article titled "Does a minimum wage raise hurt workers? Economists say: We don't know." Uncertain was his conclusion from a poll conducted by the Initiative on Global Markets, at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, of 42 nationally ranked economists on the question of whether raising the federal minimum wage to $15 over the next five years would reduce employment opportunities for low-wage workers. The Senate Budget Committee's blog says, "Top Economists Are Backing Sen. Bernie Sanders on Establishing a $15 an Hour Minimum Wage." It lists...

A few years ago, BET had a commentary titled "Where Are the Grocery Stores in Black Neighborhoods?" One wonders whether anyone thinks that the absence of supermarkets in predominantly black neighborhoods means that white merchants do not like dollars coming out of black hands. Racial discrimination cannot explain the absence of supermarkets in black communities. Compare the operation of a supermarket in a low-crime neighborhood with that of one in a high-crime neighborhood. You will see differences in how they operate. Supermarkets in low-crime neighborhoods often have merchandise on display near entrances. They may have merchandise left unattended outside...

One of the most intriguing movies I've seen in a long time is The Big Short. It's about the housing bubble and what we now call the Great Recession, based on Michael Lewis's bestselling book "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine." The main characters are money managers who not only realized that the housing bubble was being supported by unsustainable subprime mortgages, but also found a way to make millions of dollars from the inevitable crash. Here are 10 things moviegoers need to know. Lesson 1: There will always be bubbles. Vernon Smith is an economist who won a...

MOSCOW -- Walking around downtown Moscow at Christmastime in the wake of a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, I was struck by a distinct feeling of deja vu from my Canadian childhood. Not since then had I heard so much English-language Christmas music infusing the cold, crisp air, or seen so many decorations everywhere that include crosses and religious symbols as well as secular reminders of the season. There is no "war on Christmas" here. Russia is moving in the opposite direction from the West in critical ways: There's a sense here that Putin is trying to preserve...

Should Obama be impeached and removed from office for being on a Terror watch list? With terrorism in the news the Democratic national socialist party has once again trotted out one of it's perennially favorite scams: The "terror watch list" issue. They have few concerns about the importation of terrorist 'Refugees' [and future illegal Democratic voters] and the down play the threat of ISIS (Daesh) but suddenly become agitated over the possibility of using those issues against their enemies. Yes, there nothing like a serious crisis that can be used for crass political gain to energize the Democratic national socialist...

Total sales in the US on Black Friday fell 10% to $10.4bn this year, down from $11.6bn in 2014, according to research firm ShopperTrak. The decline in sales on the traditional busiest shopping day of the year has been blamed on shops opening the day before. But this year, sales on Thanksgiving also dropped, and by the same percentage, to $1.8bn. A big reason for the decline is increased online shopping, as Americans hunt down deals on their smartphones, tablets and computers. Many retailers are also offering bargains long before Thanksgiving, limiting the impact of Black Friday specials.

........."We were 'Chavistas'," said Julio Coromoto...a workman next to a queue of dozens at a shabby supermarket."But they destroyed this town.".... Nationwide polls predict voters will punish the socialists next month, possibly taking away their majority in the National Assembly for the first time since Chavez took power in early 1999.To hold on to loyalists, the government is milking Chavez's legacy at every turn, re-naming voting centers after him, splashing his smiling face on billboards and filling state television with his most rousing speeches.In Barinas, his brother Argenis and cousin Asdrubal are running for the legislature, hoping to follow in...

Until the 19th century, the Chinese practiced a method of torture called lingchi. Better known as “death by a thousand cuts” it involved slicing small pieces of flesh from a victim’s body, one by one, so that death was both protracted and utterly excruciating. This is what the realities of economics are doing to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The authors of health care “reform” believed they could ignore the dismal science. The laws of economics have rewarded this hubris by ruthlessly inflicting fact after agonizing fact on Obamacare. And, like all lingchi victims, it will eventually succumb....

If you sit around believing the right wing radio propaganda that the wealthy know what's best for us then be prepared to suffer the fate that many others have suffered under the oppression of aristocrats in the past. But we live in a Democratic Republic overwhelmingly dominated by voters who are not wealthy. So its pretty simple to go out and vote for our own interest every couple of years-- without the need for any mass protest or even any union participation. We could raise the incomes of the poorest by simply passing laws to raise the minimum wage. Many...