Free Republic

I am pretty sure the editors of the Wall Street Journal would be disinclined to endorse Pope Francis' call for international regulation of markets via state action, to promote impact investment. Yet, that is just what he called for yesterday in speaking to a meeting at the Vatican on the theme "Investing in the Poor," which was organized, in part, by the University of Notre Dame. The pope said: Advances in technology have increased the speed of financial transactions, but in the long run this is significant only to the extent that it better serves the common good. In this...

President Obama, in an address speech to UC Irvine graduates Saturday, took aim at congressional Republicans and others who dispute climate change, saying they posed a threat to the future.

Maybe it’s me, but the predictable right-wing cries of outrage over the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rules on carbon seem oddly muted and unfocused. I mean, these are the people who managed to create national outrage over nonexistent death panels. Now the Obama administration is doing something that really will impose at least some pain on some people. Where are the eye-catching fake horror stories? For what it’s worth, however, the attacks on the new rules mainly involve the three C’s: conspiracy, cost and China. That is, right-wingers claim that there isn’t any global warming, that it’s all a hoax...

There can be little doubt that Thomas Piketty's new book Capital in the 21st Century has struck a nerve globally. In fact, the Piketty phenomenon (the economic equivalent to Beatlemania) has in some ways become a bigger story than the ideas themselves. However, the book's popularity is not at all surprising when you consider that its central premise: how radical wealth redistribution will create a better society, has always had its enthusiastic champions (many of whom instigated revolts and revolutions). What is surprising, however, is that the absurd ideas contained in the book could captivate so many supposedly intelligent people....

Everyone knows the famous Chinese proverb: Give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime. So why does the federal government spend so much money on giving away fish and so little on teaching people how to fish? Because Democrats want people to depend on government so that they will vote to re-elect them. Think of all the redistributive programs we have to help people. The minimum wage, food stamps, housing subsidies, free cell phones, and Medicaid are just a few of the...

My wife and I are in our mid fifties. We are grandparents. We have tried to play by the rules. Yesterday, I came home from lunch to find his and her notices in our mailbox from the IRS. The fiends have recalculated our income from a few years back and now suddenly want over 21,000 dollars in fees and penalties. They don't even audit you anymore. They just recalculate and demand payment. This is how they operate. So if this thing is worked out, we will pay five hundred bucks a month to the IRS for most of our remaining...

We previously addressed The dead-end Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ backwards looking road to nowhere: Coates never gives the answer as to who gets what and how. And that’s ultimately the problem with reparations arguments that are not based upon the people causing the harm paying the people directly harmed by specific conduct soon after the conduct is remedied. As Coates explained his views to Melissa-Harris Perry this morning, it became clear that there is no sense at all of holding the guilty accountable in the sense we normally do, or compensating actual victims. There is a complete disconnect between...

The occupy movement is circling back on itself with the announcement of the final prosecution of protester Cecily McMillian. Sentenced to three months for elbowing a police officer, those within and without the movement are wondering where they go from here and what it all means. The founders of the movement have moved from cities into the country, and are organizing to occupy the polls to rout out corruption. However, there are questions within the confines of the Electoral College as to how much change this focus can produce. One element of the occupy movement from its headquarters in Zuccotti...

LACKAWANNA, NY - "Some money has been misappropriated and maybe somebody should pay the penalty for this," the words of Lackawanna Municipal Housing Authority executive director Norman Polanski. Polanski says tenants of the public housing development deserve better. He's referring to the representation for Baker Homes. It is one of the public housing units in Lackawanna. Federal tax dollars are given to the housing authority and they in turn are required to give money to tenant councils. After a 2013 audit found "apparent abuse" of federal dollars by the Baker Homes Tenant Council due to daily ATM cash withdrawals and...

The City plans to attack economic segregation in its affordable housing plan—placing the poor in middle-class neighborhoods and the more affluent in high-poverty spots. Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Vicki Been said the plan to build 80,000 new affordable apartments and preserve 120,000 units would create a more diverse city. “We really have to make economic diversity a cornerstone of that plan,” she said at a City Council budget hearing Wednesday. …

The City plans to attack economic segregation in its affordable housing plan — placing the poor in middle-class neighborhoods and the more affluent in high-poverty spots. Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Vicki Been said the plan to build 80,000 new affordable apartments and preserve 120,000 units would create a more diverse city. “We really have to make economic diversity a cornerstone of that plan,” she said at a City Council budget hearing Wednesday. “That means that in some neighborhoods that have mostly middle or upper-income housing, that we would need to put affordable housing at the very lowest income,” she...

The Obamanation formula for the successful financial "Fundamental Transformation of the United States of America" can be defined, in part, as follows: Mc + Vf = Sg Where: * Mc = Marxist Communism, defined by Englishman Intellectual Karl Marx as: "FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEED." * Vf = Volker Failure threshold of permanent financial failure as defined by Economist Intellectual Paul Volker: "The Federally Regulated stimulation of financial debt, Private, State, or Federal, until that financial debt exceeds what can be recovered in a court-managed bankruptcy." * Sg = Single Government, which is...

Conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage says if Pope Francis wants income redistribution he should start with his own Church. On his Friday show, Savage said he would bid $1 million for Michelangelo's famous painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. "The reason I'm offering that money to the pope and the Vatican is so they can redistribute the wealth that begins in the Vatican itself," Savage said. Savage said he was making a point that there is vast wealth within the Catholic Church, including priceless works of art and major shares in global companies....

I wonder if a "limited redistribution" of wealth includes selling the Vatican archives, the Vatican library, Vatican papers, vatican treasures, etc, etc to various museums and other institutions around the world, and then "redistributing" the wealth that would be procured from this? Some may say that words have been misinterpreted. If so, then clarify without any possible misunderstanding. But... if there is no misinterpretation, then why not include these in the redistribution of wealth?

Pope Francis demands wealth redistribution. He forgets St. John Paul's recognition of the "positive role of business, the market, private property" as "the model which ought to be proposed" for the Third World. Addressing U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other officials on Friday, the first supreme pontiff from Latin America called for "the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state." Excuse the irreverence, but his holiness may be forgetting the hundreds of millions of souls whose lives have been improved, lengthened, even saved by maximizing capitalism and minimizing government.

Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that once condemned the movement, has said. In a lengthy interview in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller said Pope Francis “is not so much a liberation theologian in the academic sense, but as far as pastoral work is concerned, he has close ties with liberation theology’s concerns. What we can learn from him is the insight that there is no pastoral work without profound theology and vice versa”. In the 1980s the...

Today Pope Francis addressed a delegation of the UN – which I remind you is a principle agent for promoting abortion world-wide.Below please find the full text of Pope Francis’ address to the United Nations Agencies, Funds and Programmes on Friday, led by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.There is some blah blah at first, but keep reading. My emphases and comments.NOTE: A lot of this is simply warmed up John Paul II and Benedict XVI. There isn’t much new here, apart from the terrible wording about the State and redistribution. But we can, for the most part, say “Ho hum!...

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Francis called Friday for governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb the "economy of exclusion" that is taking hold today.

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Francis called Friday for governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb the "economy of exclusion" that is taking hold today. Francis made the appeal during a speech to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of major U.N. agencies who met in Rome this week. Latin America's first pope has frequently lashed out at the injustices of capitalism and the global economic system that excludes so much of humanity, though his predecessors have voiced similar concerns. On Friday, Francis called for the United Nations to promote...

The latest speech from Pope Francis is leading Drudge and the Twittersphere, and for good reason. Any time a world leader talks about “legitimate redistribution” in regard to economic policy, it raises eyebrows, if not hackles. In the case of this pontiff, the highlight of that phrase provokes heightened scrutiny. However, the longer context of Francis’ remarks this morning to UN leadership provides a much more nuanced picture of Francis’ view of economic policy — although probably not nuanced enough for libertarian ears: With this in mind, I would like to remind you, as representatives of the chief agencies of...