Free Republic

Why a Human Utopia Won't Happen by Bill Bradford My children started watching it first. I happened to see it on television occasionally. Then I found myself drawn into this social drama by the endless manifestations of ever-evolving technology. Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry, is the popular space-odyssey television adventure in which man in the 25th century is expanding his philosophy and near-utopian coexistence among other, less-sophisticated, inhabitants of the galaxies.It's an idea older than Plato that man can somehow engineer a civilization that brings peace, happiness and prosperity to all who can be persuaded to embrace its philosophy.In...

Neil Clark says that he went to Havana in search of a left-wing Utopia and discovered instead an island fortress of poverty, corruption and currency apartheid It’s a country where the vast majority live in poverty, while a tiny, corrupt elite live in luxury. It’s a place where, 14 years after South Africa abolished apartheid, a form of it still operates. Welcome to Cuba, the ‘socialist’ paradise built by that great egalitarian Fidel Castro, who after 49 years at the helm has finally decided to hand over power — in the manner of a true democrat — to his brother...

Business execs arrested for refusing to cut prices By Angus Shaw ASSOCIATED PRESS July 9, 2007 HARARE, Zimbabwe – Police arrested 16 more business leaders in a crackdown on those suspected of violating the government's order to slash prices by 50 percent, the official media reported yesterday. The mandated price cuts ordered more than two weeks ago are a desperate attempt to confront inflation that has spun out of control during Zimbabwe's economic crisis. The falling prices have caused stampedes, panic buying and near-riots. Among those arrested in the latest sweep were the directors of Edgars, a leading clothing and...

          First let's look at what "universal" healthcare actually means: The British government says that, at any one time, there are about a million people waiting to get into hospitals. According to the Fraser Institute, almost 900,000 Canadian patients are on the waiting list at any point in time. And, according to the New Zealand government, 90,000 people are on the waiting lists there.           As for “guaranteed” healthcare, Canadian and British doctors see 50 percent more patients than American doctors do, and, as a consequence, they have less time to spend with each patient. Furthermore, being the 100th person...

A national healthcare system may be the Holy Grail of American liberalism. If only the government managed medicine, the argument goes, costs could be restrained, quality assured, and access extended from the poshest beach house to the humblest shotgun shack. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” last fall, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D.–Ill.) advocated a “universal health-care system over the next 10 years.” If Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.–N. Y.) reaches the Oval Office, she likely would take another crack at socialized medicine, as she did so disastrously in 1994. Amy Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research sees this...

A day or two after the Democrats swept the midterms, I made a promise to finally finish reading an incredible little book called “The Road to Serfdom.” (1944) The following are direct quotes from the English author, F.A. Hayek. I offer excerpts from the first couple of chapters with the intention of motivating as many Freepers as possible to read it themselves so as to be fully armed when the Democrats and Rinos attempt to further socialize and ultimately destroy a once proud republic. Foreward Dedicated “To the Socialists of All Parties” Fascism and Communism are merely variants of the...

Introduction: utopia vs. nationhood By Roger Kimball | Volume 25, January 2007I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.—Jean-Jacques Rousseau In a memorable passage at the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant evokes a soaring dove that, “cleaving the air in her free flight,” feels the resistance of the wind and imagines that its flight “would be easier still in empty space.” A fond thought, of course, since absent that aeolian pressure the dove would simply plummet to the ground. How regularly the friction of reality works that way: making possible our...

... Schwarzenegger will need the same people skills to repair another fracture on his right — his deteriorating relationship with the legislative wing of the Republican Party. Right now, that relationship is headed from critical condition to "do not resuscitate." LEGISLATIVE Republicans have every reason to gripe. The governor's most notable "conservative" accomplishments are defensive in nature: He hasn't raised taxes (now debatable, depending on how one interprets the revenue provisions of his universal healthcare plan); he hasn't signed a same-sex marriage law; and he refuses to provide driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. ... There is an underlying irony to...

A random, violent crime wave is sweeping the most urban parts of the Bay Area, producing 150 killings in Oakland, San Francisco and Richmond and inspiring controversial initiatives to help stem the murderous tide. In Oakland, where recent victims have included innocent grandmothers and teenagers, murders are nearly on pace to shatter a 13-year record. This summer, killings are happening on average, every three days. In San Francisco, a man's Wednesday evening roll in his wheelchair ended in his death when a stray bullet pierced his heart. His fiancee could not push him fast enough to elude the wild shot...

Explaining the monumental failure of the Soviet system and empire, Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, a former official Soviet military historian, stressed that "the roots of the catastrophe lay in the ideology itself, in Leninism." All told, the "catastrophe" of attempting to impose a Marxist-Leninist utopia in the Soviet Union resulted in the deaths of as many as 25 million people, according to recently released and hitherto inaccessible Soviet archives -- a death toll that was the direct consequence of centrally planned massacres, mass deportations, labor camps, torture and famine. ... Within months of his rise to power, Lenin provided the definition...

Sigmund Freud was the fellow who had the copyright on the ego, the id and the superego. He was also the guy who managed to turn the couch, formerly just another piece of over-stuffed Viennese furniture, into a legitimate business expense. But even he acknowledged that he was unable to decipher what it was that women wanted. Strangely enough, that happens to be one question to which I actually know the answer. Women want men to be manly chaps, strong and virile, while at the same time they want us to be completely open and in touch with our emotions....

HAVANA - Over the past 10 years I've crossed Cuba many times -- by train, bus, motorcycle and '57 Chevy, transported on the backs of produce wagons and horse-drawn carts, standing in peso trucks shoulder-to-shoulder with locals, and squeezed atop water carriers. Along the central motorway, down dusty trails that pass obscure rural villages, through seemingly impassible roads after torrents of rain, my drivers took a foreigner aboard, even if it was forbidden. Some even took me into their homes and allowed me to witness their lives. Their kindness will stay with me always. So will their terrible plight. When...

In a remarkably even-handed article, Margaret Bunting points Guardian readers to the emerging debate on human enhancement, and the forthcoming pamphlet on “Better Humans" from the British thinktank Demos. To the real enthusiasts - they call themselves transhumanists - humanity is on the point of being liberated from its biology. In their advocacy of our “technological rights”, they believe that human beings are on the brink of a huge leap in development, leaving behind the sick, quarrelsome, weak, fallible creatures we have been up to now. We will be, as their slogan goes, “better than well”. This is the prospect...

Enrico Ferri (1856-1926), a prominent socialist of his day, was an Italian criminologist who for many years was the editor of Avanti, a socialist daily.  Writing in "Socialism and Religious Beliefs," he spoke of the all-important connection between Darwin's theory and socialism:  "I add that not only is Darwinism not contrary to socialism, but that it forms one of its fundamental scientific premises.  As Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing else than the logical and vital outcome partly of Darwinism and partly of Spencerian evolution."  (www.marxists.org/...) Enrico frankly discussed how and why Darwinian socialism serves as an alternate religion:  "socialism...

Where else but California? By: Ray Haynes - Commentary Where else but our socialist paradise? Three bills before the Legislature last week demonstrate just how out of touch the Legislative majority really is. First, AB 1418 by Jerome Horton. Last year, Republicans wanted to list the names and addresses of child molesters on the Internet so that parents could protect their children from the sexual predators in their neighborhoods. The listing was a common-sense approach for parents who, with information about sexual predators, could take steps to protect their children from these evil perpetrators. The Democrats were afraid these predators...

As optimism poured into their hearts and knowledge crammed into their brains, more than 100 local residents peered with a wan smile into their collective future Friday during the first official smart growth educational workshop. Four erudite speakers presented a path toward a near-utopian life for Ukiahans -- full of walkable communities, slower traffic and more prominent greenscaping. But it was the far-reaching, more intimate impacts of smart growth that produced a series of gasps from the audience. A cross-sectional crowd of elected officials, public and private planners, contractors, builders and other concerned citizens took part of the workshop, co-sponsored...

A surge in random violence has pushed San Francisco's homicide rate ahead of last year's pace, leaving city officials wondering what more they can do to reduce the bloodshed. Two killings took place Friday. In the first, a carpenter was gunned down in the morning as he walked in a Mission District alley, possibly because he was wearing a blue shirt in territory claimed by a gang that wears red. Then at 6:30 p.m., an unidentified man was gunned down in the 1600 block of Sunnydale Avenue. The two killings brought the city's total to 84 slayings in 2005, compared...

With critics charging he misled Americans on the war in Iraq, President Bush says, "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops." Is it right to argue about the reasons for going to war, or should we "put this debate behind us," as the president's national security adviser suggests?

Freeper Investigation: Original Intent and Constitutional Jurisprudence by Jean F. Drew English and Anglo-American law’s core principle is the opposition to abusive power as exercised by the state. As Dan Gifford writes in “The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason,” “The law is not the law regardless if it be good, bad, or indifferent. There is a higher moral law, originating within ancient Jewish law, which requires individual responsibility for opposing evil and promoting goodness. It is from this basic tenet that English law and Anglo-American law embody the following principle: The individual has rights against the...

The LA Times recently ran a story about the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit, which contained a mind-boggling statistic: of the more than 100 offenders the unit has arrested over the last four years, “all but one” has been “a hard-core Trekkie.” Blogger Ernest Miller thought this claim was improbable. “I could go to a science fiction convention,” he explained “and be less likely to find that 99+ percent of the attendees were hard-core Trekkies.” While there may be quibbling about the exact numbers, the Toronto detectives claim that the connection is undeniable. In fact, Star...