Free Republic

What makes some nations wealthy and others not? One way to address that question is to look for patterns: what do wealthy nations do that non-wealthy nations don't? Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/why_doesnt_the_world_imitate_the_us.html#ixzz2Am0gfo62

A Farmer’s Tale In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself–at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study-all on scholarships, TAships, research-ships and part-time summer and school jobs tucked under the aegis of the academic, no-consequences world. By the end of endless seminars, papers, theses, debates, discussions, academic get-togethers, I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18. The Return Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to...

Proponents of government-run health care like to point out that countries with such a system spend a smaller percentage of their gross domestic product on health care than the United States. What they don't like to mention is how those savings are achieved. For example:

Another Perspective What Are Op-Eds For? By Iain Murray Published 2/1/2006 12:08:02 AM WASHINGTON -- Ever since the Cato Institute fired syndicated columnist Doug Bandow over the revelation that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff had asked and paid him to write articles favorable to his clients, the Left and some in the media have launched a witch hunt against conservative writers with links to private industry. Yet, during this burning time, no one is asking the question: What are opinion pieces for? The question has not arisen because some on the Right, by acquiescing to the Left's desire for blood, are...

As State of the Union addresses go, last night's was pretty good. Anchored by the ever-important restatement of the President's bold foreign policy vision, the speech made the apparently inevitable devolution into a domestic policy laundry list with relative grace: Just as the foreign policy section pitted tough engagement with the world against an isolationist foreign policy, the economic policy section pitted "keeping America competitive" against an isolationist economic policy. (Whether or not isolationism really describes the dominant challenges to Bush's policies is certainly open to debate; my point here is simply the rhetorical elegance of the construction.) But the...