Free Republic

The Church has always struggled to find good leaders. However, as recently as a hundred years ago, bureaucratic structures did not dominate its life as they do today. What happened? {snip} The Vatican also furthered this revolution, despite already having a centralized bureaucracy and despite the vaunted “collegiality” proclaimed at Vatican II. When Paul VI reorganized the papal Curia in 1967, effective control over other curial departments fell to the Secretariate of State, marking a “turn to the world” in its orientation, downgrading the importance of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Paul VI also allowed bishops to...

Anthony Fauci is the ultimate bureaucrat. He is 80 years old and has worked for the federal government since the Lyndon Johnson administration. Apparently there is no expiration date for bureaucrats. Fauci has been wrong so often, and has contradicted himself so many times, that much of the public has lost confidence in him. Yet he clings to office like a superannuated senator. Yesterday Hugh Hewitt recited some of Fauci’s errors and contradictions, suggested that much of the public has lost confidence in him, and asked whether there are any circumstances in which Fauci would consider resigning for the good...

This post is about a situation where the correct public policy approach should be obvious to everyone, but the perverse incentives of government as usual push in exactly the wrong direction. The issue is how many people should receive benefits, and in what amounts, from government “safety net” programs. From all I can find, there appears to be near-universal support for at least some level of government “safety net” for the poor. After all, no one wants to see fellow citizens starving for lack of food, or dying for lack of medical attention to a curable health condition, and so...

In June, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) published a notice of proposed rulemaking that would make nearly all firearms configured with a pistol stabilizing brace subject to the National Firearms Act, requiring taxation and registration of millions of lawfully acquired firearms. The proposal represents a dramatic shift in ATF treatment of pistol-stabilizing braces. The new rule would implement a points system akin to the method used for determining the legality of imported handguns. Brace-equipped firearms would be required to weigh more than 4 lbs. and measure between 12" and 26". Braces installed on firearms meeting those parameters...

A new report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, both retired, for members of Congress paints a portrait of the Navy as an institution adrift. The report, first reported by the Journal and commissioned by Sen. Tom Cotton, Reps. Mike Gallagher, Dan Crenshaw and Jim Banks, concludes that the surface Navy is not focused on preparing for war and is weathering a crisis in leadership and culture. The impetus for the report was a series of recent catastrophes—a ship burning in San Diego last year; two destroyer collisions in the Pacific in 2017. Were...

Republicans are hesitant to endorse Biden's plan — and for good reason.Congress is expected to take action on President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan any day now, but Republicans are hesitant to endorse the expensive plan, which is filled with Democrat agenda goals and progressive talking points.Biden originally said last week he would not sign the infrastructure plan that garnered GOP support unless the legislative body also passed a reconciliation bill littered with leftist agenda items. When Republicans promised to jeopardize Biden’s plan by pulling out of the “bipartisan” part of the deal in response, Biden walked back his statement and...

On April 19, the Vancouver Sun printed an article about the COVID-linked death of an infant under two years old. Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s provincial health officer, lamented that the infant’s tragic death “reminds us of the vicious nature of this virus.” The kicker, which Henry failed to mention, is that this was the very first COVID-19 death under the age of 30 in a province with a population of over 5 million. It turns out it was inside the BC Children’s Hospital that the child caught its infection—“behind the doors of a government institution,” as Julius Ruechel in...

As even many casual observers of America's fractious politics are aware, the overwhelming majority of lawmaking at the federal level no longer takes place in Congress as the Constitution's framers intended. Instead, the vast majority of the "rulemaking" governing Americans' day-to-day lives now takes place behind closed doors, deep in the bowels of the administrative state's sprawling bureaucracy. The brainchild of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, arguments on behalf of the modern administrative state are ultimately rooted in, among other factors, a disdain for the messy give-and-take of republican politics and an epistemological preference for rule by enlightened clerisy. Put more...

Never put anything in an email that you do not want the entire world to see. Unfortunately, Dr. Tony Fauci is learning that lesson the hard way. Throughout the course of this pandemic, the mainstream media has been heralding Fauci as a voice of reason that we should trust without hesitation. He came to be regarded as the ultimate authority on all questions related to COVID, and social media companies banned countless users that dared to suggest that he might be wrong about certain things. Well, now everything is going to change. Thanks to thousands of Fauci emails that have...

Senior leaders at the Environmental Protection Agency improperly meddled in the work of career scientists when reviewing the approval of certain pesticides in 2018, according to a new report and the agency’s own admission. The top officials changed and omitted items from documents related to the decision to grant licenses to three dicamba pesticides, the EPA inspector general found, and created a culture in which career employees felt “constrained” and “muted” from speaking up. In addition to violating EPA’s scientific integrity policies, the tampering left the agency vulnerable to lawsuits. The IG report followed widespread allegations of political interference in...

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...

Many Republican governors are fighting hard right now against the progressive agenda to maintain some semblance of a sane life, especially with regards to Draconian COVID regulations, infringement on constitutional 2nd Amendment rights and the acceptance of illegal immigrants. This is all good. However, the key to this voter protest will be the traditional moderate Democrats. (Yes, there are still a lot of them.) Obviously, conservatives will be opposed to the progressives right from the start, but they only comprise 40-45% of the vote. In order for the really hard-core progressive movement to be stopped, it will take significant old-line...

President Biden's plan would be a burden on the economy and reduce prosperity over the long run. President Biden has just unveiled a new $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” plan, but a shockingly large portion of this bill is actually unrelated to infrastructure. The plan includes massive subsidies for corporations as well as state and local governments, and comes right after the administration’s proposed increase in the corporate tax rate, which would raise the rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. There’s $300 billion for manufacturing, $100 billion for electric utilities, $100 billion for broadband, $174 billion for electric vehicles, and a...

The latest batch of Executive Orders signed by President Biden included one revoking the Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Program (IRAP) established by President Trump in 2017. According to the Biden Administration "the problem with the Trump program is that it allowed trade and industry groups, companies, non-profit organizations, unions, and joint labor-management organizations to create their own apprenticeship programs that would help workers obtain the skills that the economy needed." Press Secretary Jen Psaki explained that "the narrow focus on developing job skills that enable the apprentices to proficiently perform the necessary tasks of their work is out-of-step with our vision of...

The county even regulates what meets the standard of a 'bonafide meal' each group of customers is required to buy if they would like to order beer. All this, we're told, fights COVID.Bart Avery started Bravery Brewing Company just 10 years ago, in 2011. Today, his son does the brewing, and it’s a full-on family business. You can find their beers in restaurants, liquor stores, gas stations, Whole Foods, and Trader Joes in the surrounding area, but the main profits come from happy customers enjoying beer on tap in the tasting room. And that’s where the problems start.With even New...

Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution. Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy... ...Arendt dubbed these...

The Biden administration must take serious steps to ensure China ceases its exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis in ways that threaten our national security.Some two decades ahead of schedule, on Jan. 12, the Trump administration declassified its Indo-Pacific Strategic Framework, a document outlining its national security strategy regarding Asia. The document is critical, and the timing of its declassification was telling.As National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien noted in a statement announcing its release, the framework “has provided overarching strategic guidance for implementing the 2017 National Security Strategy within the world’s most populous and economically dynamic region.”By making the document...

2020 punctuated the generations-long decline of our republic. Will that half of America that sent Trump to drain the swamp care anymore after believing themselves disenfranchised in 2020?“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Never has...

FDA regulators are wasting precious time in greenlighting a COVID vaccine as more than 2,000 Americans are dying each day....... Pfizer submitted data detailing the safety and effectiveness of its vaccine on Nov. 22. But rather than immediately convening experts, the FDA scheduled a review meeting on Dec. 10, almost three weeks later.....So what is the FDA doing for three weeks? As a Johns Hopkins scientist who has conducted more than 100 clinical studies and reviewed thousands more from the scientific community at large, I can assure you that the agency’s review can be done within 24 to 48 hours...

Before leaving the White House, Trump should do what he should have done as soon as he took office: remove deep-staters wholesale, starting with the FBI and the CIA.Arnaud-Amaury is not exactly a household name in America, but Donald Trump could change that. Arnaud-Amaury was the Cistercian monk who commanded the church’s forces at the Massacre at Béziers, which we do remember (it was the first major battle of the Albigensian Crusade) on July 22, 1209, just 811 years before Trump lost the presidential election by a few hundred thousand ballots, at least some of which were fraudulent, to an...