Free Republic

Nancy Pfotenhauser, David Madland, S.E. Cupp & Jennifer Granholm debate the latest job numbers.

Walter Williams is a veteran, a professor of economics at George Mason University, a syndicated columnist, a fill-in host for Rush Limbaugh and an author of eight books. Williams has one of the finest minds in America as you're about to see as you read these quotations. 20) How many times have we heard “free tuition,” “free health care,” and free you-name-it? If a particular good or service is truly free, we can have as much of it as we want without the sacrifice of other goods or services. Take a “free” library; is it really free? The answer is...

This video is for the 'Economics Music Video Contest' sponsored by Fayetteville State University's Hackley Endowment. These are students at Washington and Lee University working under Dr. Tim Diette.

The Warmist conspiracy has reached a critical point, with doubters in the establishment speaking out. One of Sweden's top climatologists now admit global temperatures have barely changed (translated from Swedish): "The Earth appears to have cooling properties that exceeds the previous thought ones, and that computer models are inadequate to try to foretell a chaotic object like the climate, where actual observation is the only way to go." In March, a scientific study "Orbital forcing of tree-ring data" found that global warming is caused by that big yellow thing in the sky. Earth's orbit varies over the centuries. Changing distance...

News is breaking out all over: global warming stopped 20 years ago. A political earthquake has resulted from a feature story in the Economist magazine because the Economist used to be a consistent cheerleader for global warming activism. Doubts about global warming used to be censored by its London editors, one reporter confided to Stephen Hayward. So what will voters do to Democrat candidates in 2014 and 2016 when the former realize that the Democratic Party was lying to them? Is it time to run away from the issue for Democrats, journalists, and Hollywood personalities? While our economy is struggling...

The climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away | OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has...

What was the Earth's temperature yesterday? Nobody knows. In fact, it's a ridiculous question. Almost every place on Earth today has a different temperature from that of any other location. So, is our planet's temperature rising? Do we even know? However, it is officially admitted: Global warming stopped 15-20 years ago. The mainstream media is struggling very hard to explain this away. They admit that the Earth stopped warming 15 to 20 years ago. But just you wait -- disaster is coming unless we vote liberals into office. They cannot explain the pause. Yet they "know" global warming will kill...

The Economist has been fairly consistent in its stand that carbon dioxide emissions from man-made sources are the chief cause of global warming. But in an editorial this week, it sounds less certain. Global warming predictions haven’t panned out as predicted in the past decade, but the why is a bit fuzzy, the magazine admits. Greenhouse gas emissions have soared during the past 15 years, the magazine notes, with 100 billion tons of carbon having been added to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. Still, both air and ground temperatures during that time have remained virtually unchanged. In fact, the...

The Economist is now tracking the Big Mac™ index around the world. Even the Federal Reserve of St Louis wrote a paper entitled “Burgernomics: A Big Mac™ Guide to Purchasing Power Parity.” Here is the Chief Economist from The Economist talking about the Big Mac index. Essentially, controlling for exchange rates, he say that Big Mac prices should be the same around the world. Prices range from 7.84 in Norway to 2.03 in South Africa. The US is in the middle at 4.37. And like their housing market, Japan’s Big Mac™ prices are deflating. Here is a chart of Big...

Economist Peter Morici had this to say this morning about Obama’s fiscal cliff negotiating tactics: “The president, by being so persistent that it’s my way or the highway, no spending cuts, taxes on folks over $250,000 or nothing, has basically put a pistol to the head of the middle class. It’s threatened them with financial extortion if he doesn’t get his way to satisfy the populist wing of the Democratic Party.”

Last night, the Obama campaign blasted out another email claiming that Mitt Romney's tax plan would either require raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the deficit. "Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes," said the Obama campaign press release. "In fact, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for Romney’s tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000."

America is heading into a retirement crisis, an economist says. Most retirees haven't saved enough money to retire and Teresa Ghilarducci blames America's entire system for retiring. It’s been 30 years since the Individual Retirement Account model became the standard way for Americans to save for retirement. But many people who saved for three decades watched a lot of that money disappear during the financial crisis. And now, more than half of American workers have saved less than $25,000 for their golden years, and about 30 percent have saved less than a thousand dollars. Overall, the system is failing, says...

Barack Obama 44% Mitt Romney 46% D - 37% R - 27% I (and leaners) - 36%

No matter how skeptical one is of the authority of “experts,” it’s hard to avoid paying at least some attention to the people who award the Nobel prize — especially when they give one to someone who tends to support some things one tended to believe already. So it is in the case of Thomas Sargent, the New York University professor who was announced Monday as a winner of the Nobel in economics. An interview of Professor Sargent by the Minneapolis Fed in August 2010 summed up some of his contributions succinctly: “policymakers can’t manipulate the economy by systematically ‘tricking’...

After President Obama tapped Princeton University professor Alan Krueger to chair the Council of Economic Advisors, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein wrote that Krueger “is arguably the leading labor economist in the country” and “known for bringing a near-superhuman rigor” to the subject. One wonders how any economist would earn a “near-superhuman” superlative for their research. One can particularly wonder in the case of Professor Krueger, who is known for his 1990s academic research that attempted to prove that employee wages were not subject to the laws of supply and demand. In 1993, Krueger and David Card published a study...

Listen up, sisters! Deficit hawks will eat your lunch, your kids, your jobs and your retirement. An economy without a deficit is like a fish without water. Reducing the U.S. federal deficit will make unemployment and poverty worse–way worse. And that means that women’s economic condition will deteriorate even further. Today’s deficit hawks (and way too many Democrats are flying with this flock), fundamentally and deliberately misinform by insisting on a fictional symmetry between private sector (household and corporate) bookkeeping and the U.S. federal debt.

Click this link for the poll results. It is in PDF format.

A wicked joke attributed to George Stigler goes: “All great economists are tall — the only exceptions are Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith.” The diminutive Friedman grows ever larger. The NBA-sized Galbraith is a fading figure: He is survived by his trademark phrase, “the conventional wisdom,” and some remember that there was a book called The Affluent Society, others that he served as ambassador to India and as the butt of many jokes made by the founder of this magazine. William F. Buckley Jr. was mistaken to have described him as “the most influential U.S. intellectual of the...

Or so he claims: Some have asked if there arenÂ’t conservative sites I read regularly. Well, no. I will read anything IÂ’ve been informed about thatÂ’s either interesting or revealing; but I donÂ’t know of any economics or politics sites on that side that regularly provide analysis or information I need to take seriously. I know weÂ’re supposed to pretend that both sides always have a point; but the truth is that most of the time they donÂ’t. The parties are not equally irresponsible; Rachel Maddow isnÂ’t Glenn Beck; and a conservative blog, almost by definition, is a blog...

Industry officials warn 7.3million American jobs will disappear if U.S. President Barack Obama's administration tightens regulations in a bid to reduce smog. The industry-sponsored researcher who came up with the number cautioned, however, that there was uncertainty surrounding that number. Although economist Don Norman pointed out: 'Even if the numbers are half of that, the number is huge.'