Free Republic

Ninety years ago today, on August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was sudden, shocking, and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since. His wife, Florence—described derisively by some as “The Duchess”—didn’t allow an autopsy, so we’ll never know exactly what caused the demise of the 29th President of the United States. It might have been congestive heart failure, or food poisoning, or even something more sinister. Seen in retrospect, through the prism of the scandals associated with his White House tenure, Harding is usually ranked well toward the...

When libertarian scholar Peter Ferrara asked rhetorically in Sunday’s issue of Forbes, “Economically, Could Obama Be America’s Worst President?” he relied heavily on statistics provided by the chief enabler of the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve. Noting that the policies of President Obama have done nothing to stimulate the economy but plenty to keep it from growing, he used recent economic recoveries as prime examples of what recoveries would look like if government would stay out of the way: The right measure and comparison for Obama’s record is not to compare the recovery to the recession, but to compare Obama’s...

Yesterday, my colleague, Marty Biancuzzo, explained why America is on a path to inevitable economic and government collapse. After reading Marty’s piece, another colleague asked me: What will America look like after a government collapse? It’s an important question, and I want to give a satisfactory answer. But I can’t do that in one short column, so I plan to return to this topic several times over the next few weeks. I hope that when I’m done, you will have a better understanding of where the country is headed. Now, consider our current situation… It’s clear that Barack Obama and...

<p>Europe in 2013 has recovered worse from its slump than Europe in 1935. Again, great work, guys.</p>

Unofficial millennial spokesperson Lena Dunham, while incisive and entertaining, is not the voice of my generation. On Dunham's buzzy dramedy Girls, self-involved twenty-somethings balk at $12 salads by day and guzzle $14 cocktails by night while parents bankroll their "groovy lifestyles." It's an enticing narrative. But these stereotypes fail to recognize some rapidly evolving trends among young echo boomers entering adulthood. Millennials, typically defined as anyone born after 1980, make up an enormous and diverse generation, but many of them share a common experience — entering adulthood during the country's greatest economic downturn since the 1930s. The financial duress of...

In 1929, Deflation Started In Europe Before Overtaking The U.S. Economics / DeflationNov 30, 2012 - 05:23 AM By: EWI What Happens in Europe Will Not Stay in Europe More than 1,500 years after the fact, scholars still debate the causes of the Roman Empire's fall. What historians do agree on is that the crumbling empire's final days were marked by economic contraction, a struggle to fund Rome's routine affairs and excessive debt. Sound familiar? Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." That quote seems to apply when economically comparing the Roman Empire and the United...

The Department of Labor's WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) website may have been exempt from layoff notices related to the fiscal cliff, but it still provides a sufficiently (bleak) complete picture about the real nature of layoffs and business cycle in general in America's busiest city. Which is why it was precisely using the WARN website that we learned that one of New York's most historic steakhouses, "NY's Prime Steakhouse since 1927" Gallagher's, located on 52nd street, and which survive the great depression, is shutting down on January 16. Surely neither the surging price of meat, nor the ability...

If you want to understand how the United States became the most prosperous society in the world, start with the ballpoint pen. László Bíró, a Hungarian who had fled the Nazis and gone to Argentina, invented the first working solid-ink pen. When the owner of Goldblatt’s department store in Chicago showed the contraption to a passing salesman named Milton Reynolds, Reynolds decided he could do it better. The year was 1944. American factories were producing a warplane every five minutes, 150 tons of steel every hour, eight aircraft carriers a month. Milton Reynolds knew nothing about this kind of heavy...

Thanks Obama - Here Are 24 Stats That Show How Much You Have Royally Messed Up Our Economy By Michael Snyder August 23st, 2012 Under Barack Obama, the U.S. economy has performed worse than it did under any other president since the end of the Great Depression. After every other recession since World War II, the U.S. economy always regained what was lost and got even stronger before the next recession began. During this "economic recovery", we have not even come close to getting back to where we were in 2008. In fact, the number of Americans living in poverty...

America is headed for a fiscal cliff if members of Congress fail to act before the end of the year. Many economists agree that if no action is taken, 2013 will begin with a $600 billion drag on the economy, or a 4 to 5 percent hit to GDP, due to a combination of tax hikes and budget cuts set to take effect. To put that in perspective, the knock to economic growth could be twice as much as current GDP growth forecasts for all of 2012 and more than any annual GDP growth in the last decade. Former Treasury...

With a second term for Obama, the world-leading America we have known and hoped to leave to our children will be gone. Last Friday's jobs report confirms that Obama is well on his way to transforming America into a third world country, with declining living standards and perpetual economic stagnation. Argentina enjoyed the world's fourth highest per capita GDP in 1929, on par with America at the time. But then the nation lost its way in embracing a leftist, union allied government, which took control of the economy and imposed wildly irresponsible taxes, spending, deficits, and debt. After World War...

Some of the most enduring images of the great depression of 1929-1939 are those of long lines of obviously beaten-down men in soup lines… hungry women and children with haunted eyes. Shantytowns sprang up all over the country, called Hoovervilles in mocking derision of the disastrous policies that engendered the crash and the even worse schemes which perpetuated the depression until 1939 and the advent of the Second World War. Twenty five per cent unemployment… some eleven million three hundred thousand people lost their jobs, homes and farms, out of a pre-depression population of 120 million. Contrast that to today,...

"And you thought it was bad now... Since the onset of the recession in 2007, pundits have compared the crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s - but this week's release of 1,000 photographs from that bygone era serves as a reminder of how truly harsh that period was. "

Traveled by Native Americans, presidents, generals, gypsies and families seeking a new life in the west, “The Great Road,” known today as Frederick Road or Route 355, provided a path for both the adventurer and the entrepreneur. As the main route northwest from Georgetown, the last port on the Potomac River, it was heavily traveled from the mid 18th century until it was replaced by Interstate 270 in the 1960s. It began as an Indian trail leading from the Piscataway settlement at the mouth of Rock Creek to the great “Conestoga,” a trail that included footpaths and waterways (what we...

I warned last week that a recession and higher unemployment were about to hit the U.S. economy. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis cut their estimate of growth in the third quarter ending September from 2.5% to 2%. Then on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve rocked financial markets by forcing America’s 31 largest U.S. banks to “stress test” balance sheets to determine their capability to withstand an 8% drop in the economy; which would cause home prices to plunge by 21%, and unemployment rate to jump to 13%.

Wanda Bridgeforth was hit hardest on the home front as a child, when her parents couldn't afford to keep her with them. At one point she lived with 19 people—in a six room house. It was in these situations that she learned to conserve what she had, and reuse what she found.

By August of 1935, Roosevelt had achieved some of his signature pieces of legislation: a new entitlement program known as Social Security, banking reform, pro-union reform, infrastructure expansion and massive transfers of wealth to the poor and middle classes. Sound familiar?

The current economic crisis rivals the one of the 1930s.  Despite shameless propaganda by government and its cronies in the media, people understand that the situation is getting worse.  Consumer confidence continues to decline as does confidence in the future.We are headed for an event that history will record as worse than the Great Depression.  It is unavoidable.The Level of DebtThe principal reason for the dire prediction is the level of debt outstanding.  Current debt levels are simply not sustainable.  Assets and cash flows cannot support or service this debt.No economic recovery can occur without massive debt reduction.  As...

Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park battened down the hatches yesterday as the early October snow turned their tents into igloos, but the close quarters also made easy pickings for one predator. A sex fiend barged into a woman’s tent and sexually assaulted her at around 6 a.m., said protesters, who chased him from the park.

The mood in the room was definitely that this country is heading towards some kind of collapse, some kind of significant disaster. That everything kind of is lined up and nobody, really, in the political realm, out there in the culture seems to have solutions… … If we look long-term. If we look at the structural problems of the United States, at over $100 Trillion in unfunded liabilities, of ongoing deficits, of no political solutions, of nobody talking about real cuts, where does this all lead? … Unless we have real structural change I think it will [lead to disaster]…...