Free Republic

In the past few decades, there have been several undeniable trends. First, the power of government at all levels, from all three branches, has increased dramatically. Simultaneously, the quality of life for ordinary Americans, especially those living in cities, has decreased significantly. Thus, as ordinary citizens have ceded more power and control to government “experts” the living conditions in our country have deteriorated considerably. The American “dream” of upward mobility and a better standard of living than the previous generation is now impossible for many young couples. Our country’s working-class citizens are finding it more difficult to survive economically. These...

The left has a fraught relationship with freedom, in that they are against it except when it comes to bizarre perversions and transgressive nonsense designed to blow your bourgeois mind. Free speech, a free press, the right to worship as you see fit – these are frustrating obstacles to their power. They insist on pretending they support these things, and they are willing to infringe upon any of your freedoms to do it. I recently mocked them with a Schiff-disturbing Twitter thread demonstrating what it might look like if the right imposed a cracked mirror-image set of left’s dream policies...

The story of America is unique in human history. Looking at the millennia of civilization, we see people exchanging one form of oppression with another. Not long ago, slavery and oppression were the universal principle of government. Around the world, power was held by the strongest, concentrated in the elite. To be sure, there were times that people revolted against oppression, but in all these cases the people traded one tyrant for another in the hopes of finding a more just master. Look at the change from the Senate to Caesar, Czar to Lenin, Lenin to Stalin, King Louis XVI...

Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, kicked off a new informational YouTube series Tuesday about COVID-19 vaccines that aims to reach Black and brown communities. Fauci participated in a question-and-answer interview with two doctors, Jamie Rutland and Italo Brown, in the first video of a planned “Barbershop Medicine” series from YouTube Originals. In the approximately nine-minute long video, posted to the American Public Health Association's YouTube channel, the doctors and Fauci discuss the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine and address vaccine hesitancy in Black and brown communities. "Sometimes, the source matters — especially for communities that bear the major...

Guess what’s unconstitutional? When the federal government tells property owners they cannot be paid by tenants who rent their property. In September 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told state courts that they could not hear eviction proceedings and unilaterally declared that private property owners had to allow non-paying renters to live rent-free until the CDC says otherwise. At the time, the CDC pointed to COVID-19 as justification for its unprecedented power grab, but it quickly proclaimed that the federal agency could stop evictions at anytime in the name of “fairness”—pandemic or not. If this sounds...

It is one of the unfortunate ironies coming out of the Biden administration that, with all the obsession about so-called equity, the policies they are putting forth will only hurt the very low-income Americans they pretend to want to help. The Biden administration is growing government at a record pace. If what they want is opportunity for every American, government policy should aim to encourage economic growth. Bigger, more intrusive government achieves the opposite. It stifles economic growth. The Biden administration submitted its first 10-year budget to Congress last month. The budget projects average annual economic growth for 2023 through...

Politicians say they pass laws to "protect Americans from big business." People like hearing that. Many don't like big business. Unfortunately, most people don't realize that those laws often help big business while hurting consumers. "Big business and big government are not enemies like a lot of people think they are," says American Enterprise Institute fellow Tim Carney in my new video. "When government gets bigger, whether it's through spending or taxes or regulation, the big guys, big business benefits." Consider the $15 minimum wage. People think of that law as pro-worker. But big companies like Walmart, Costco and Amazon...

Twitter locked the account of the National File, a national populist news website, for reporting on a tweet from Tami Burages, a woman who says her 13-year old nephew died three days after receiving a second dose of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. Twitter later said the account had been locked in error and reinstated it. According to a Twitter spokesman, the platform took enforcement action on the National File’s account in error. That action has been reversed and the account has been reinstated. The National File’s report was about Twitter user Tami Burages, who said her teenage nephew had died shortly...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve signaled Wednesday that it may act sooner than previously planned to start dialing back the low-interest rate policies that have helped fuel a swift rebound from the pandemic recession but have also coincided with rising inflation. The Fed’s policymakers forecast that they would raise their benchmark short-term rate, which influences many consumer and business loans, twice by late 2023. They had previously estimated that no rate hike would occur before 2024. In a statement after its latest policy meeting, the Fed also said it expects the pandemic to have a diminishing effect on the...

Drought has dried up what was Mexico’s second-biggest lake, destroying a once thriving fishing economy in Michoacán. The scale of the problem? Lake Cuitzeo should have 800 million cubic meters of water, but today it doesn’t even have 200. Now, the more than 300-square-kilometer reservoir has become a cemetery for fishing boats and a shortcut for motorists to reach Morelia, the state capital of Michoacán. The water disappearance also creates frequent and prolonged dust clouds that sometimes reach nearby communities, affecting health of residents, as well as causing allergies, respiratory illnesses and gastrointestinal complications from the bacteria they transport. Everything...

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on Tuesday suggested using a truck-only vehicle miles traveled tax during the Senate Finance Committee's hearing on infrastructure funding. His suggested method would levy a tax of 25-cents for every mile driven. The mileage would be tracked via government-mandated devices that report the data back to the IRS. -snip- Texas Trucking Association President and CEO John D. Esparza noted taxing drivers a quarter for every mile equates to approximately $25,000 per truck that drives 100,000 miles a year – almost half the average salary for a truck driver. "Eighty-eight percent of trucking businesses in Texas are...

The author of 'Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order' discusses mass surveillance, smart cities, and the history of technocratic control.In many respects, technology has eroded personal autonomy. This insidious trend has only accelerated due to governments’ response to the global pandemic. The average citizen is left disoriented by rapid changes brought on by automation, mass surveillance, dizzying propaganda, and the proliferation of invasive technologies.Patrick Wood has been making sense of the technocratic movement for more than a decade. His 2015 book “Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation” tracks the current implementation of technological central planning: mass surveillance,...

The incentives bureaucrats face may cause them to act in a way that is rational for themselves and their bureaucracies, but is not optimal from a social perspective.That America’s national debt now stands more than $28 trillion has done little to temper Democrats’ enthusiasm for more and bigger government programs, even as a 2020 poll by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation found that 73 percent of voters have become more concerned about the national debt.We might surmise that while most voters recognize the soaring national debt to be a problem, many are willing to accept budget deficits if the resulting...

When I began my work 25 years ago, my vision for fixing our poor, broken communities was driven by my belief in America and what made it successful. It's what I call the 3 C's: the principles of Christianity, the virtues of capitalism and the rule of law outlined in our Constitution. After the civil rights movement, big government was deemed necessary to turn poor communities around. When then-President Johnson affixed his signature to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the given assumption was that, although there was new law protecting freedom -- civil rights -- for all, low-income Black...

Because nothing makes more sense than socialism: just ask a Democrat! Amidst all the Morning Joe gushing today over President Biden's radical plans as laid out in his address to Congress, the most frighteningly fact-defying was that by NBC contributor and left-wing activist Heather McGhee. McGhee twice claimed that Biden's plans are neither left nor right, but simply what is required to solve problems, saying "it takes government," "it takes collective action," government needs to "give" people various things, and Biden's intended vast expansion of government is simply "common sense. Get the rest of the story and view the video...

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board said it best: Biden's latest $1.8 trillion plan rejects the old social contract of work for benefits...So much for the “safety net” to prevent poverty.This is now about mainlining benefits to middle-class families so they become addicted to government - and to the Democratic Party that has become the promoting agent of government....All of this adds up to healthy guaranteed annual income largely untied to the social contract that requires work, which is the real path to independence and self-respect.The new taxes are destructive, but their impact will take time to be felt as...

MAE SAKOEP, Thailand (AP) — Thai soldiers began sending back some of the thousands of people who have fled a series of airstrikes by the military in neighboring Myanmar, people familiar with the matter said Monday. But Thai officials denied that as the insecurity on the border added a new dimension to an already volatile crisis set off by a coup in Myanmar. The weekend strikes, which sent ethnic Karen people seeking safety in Thailand, represented another escalation in the violent crackdown by Myanmar’s junta on protests of its Feb. 1 takeover. On Saturday, ( more than 100 people were...

The earmark vote shows that far too many purportedly conservative lawmakers want to partake in the big-government excesses of the Biden era.It appears House Republicans need to become re-acquainted with the late Democratic Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and humorist Mark Twain. Both men famously commented on the lack of educational value of the second kick of a mule, which aptly describes the actions of the Republican conference in endorsing a return to congressional earmarks.These earmarks—or, as lawmakers now wish to rebrand them, “community project funding”—bred corruption and scandals during their heyday in the 2000s. Just as important, they...

WASHINGTON — A quarter-century ago, a Democratic president celebrated “the end of welfare as we know it,” challenging the poor to exercise “independence” and espousing balanced budgets and smaller government. The Democratic Party capped a march in the opposite direction this week.... ...The new Democratic stance is “a long cry from the days of ‘big government is over,’” said Margaret Weir, a political scientist at Brown University.... ...Republicans’ increasing efforts to define themselves as a party of the working class, has scrambled the politics of economic policy across the ideological spectrum....

The Lord Jesus talked of an ETERNALLY far greater tyranny to man than Big Government, excessive taxation, burdensome mandates and ceaseless intrusions into the lives of its citizens. “Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant [slave] of sin” (John 8:34). “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned…. For if by one man's offence death reigned by one….That as sin hath reigned unto death” (Rom. 5:12,17a; 21a). “O wretched man that I am! Who...