Free Republic

The stupidest, lamest, and couldn’t-be-more-mistaken charge often leveled at those who find great merits in free markets (such as me and my colleagues at GMU Economics and the Mercatus Center, and my dear friends at institutions such as the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution) is that we’re “bought off by” or are “paid shills for” rich business people. Such a charge or belief reflects an utter misunderstanding of economics and of how economies operate. Currently successful business people have a material interest in stifling at least some market competition and in themselves receiving handouts and special privileges from the...

The most outrageous candidate on the stump in 2016 is not, if you can believe it, Donald Trump. It is someone who calls himself Vermin Supreme, the satirical presidential hopeful known for wearing a bushy white beard and an upended boot on his head and making ridiculous promises to voters: a pony for every American; more federal research into time travel (“to go back and kill baby Hitler”); and of course preparedness for the inevitable zombie invasion. Yet when it comes to the kinds of economic promises we’re hearing these days, even the serious presidential candidates are in danger of...

Members of Congress did something almost unheard of at Tuesday’s hearing on the brewing battle over encryption between Apple and the FBI: their job. Both Democrats and Republicans grilled FBI director Jim Comey about his agency’s unprecedented demand that Apple weaken the iPhone’s security protections to facilitate surveillance. This would have dire implications for smartphone users around the globe.

If I had a time machine, one of the first things I think I'd do would be to pop back to Free Republic, circa 2006, and post something like this:Hi, everybody, this is Eric Pode, FR timetraveler from the year 2016, talkin' at ya!Just wanted to let ya know that ten years hence, thousands of Freepers are gonna support a Presidential candidate who: thinks President Bush lied about WMD to get us into war, thinks 9-11 was President Bush's fault since it "happened on his watch", and thinks President Bush should be impeached!!I wonder what the reaction would be.Would I...

There was a strange stillness in the news on Saturday morning, a Saturday morning that came earlier in Paris than it did in Des Moines, a city in Iowa, one of the United States of America. The body count had stabilized. The new information came at a slow, stately pace, as though life were rearranging itself out of quiet respect for the dead. The new information came at a slow and stately pace and it arranged itself in the way that you suspected it would arrange itself when the first accounts of the mass murder began to spread out over...

Back in 2008, rather than fix mark-to-market accounting, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke, and other members of the financial market crisis team, chose to use a government-funded bazooka. A $700 billion bank bailout named The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. President Bush, who authorized this approach, later explained it by saying he "abandoned free market principles to save the free market." That statement makes no sense. Either you believe in free markets, or you don't. Violating a free market means it's not free. More truthfully, the Bush team abandoned free markets because it was...

You may not know this, but Brazilian sugar is a threat to U.S. national security. At least, that is the view of Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.). Asked this month about his support for sugar subsidies, Rubio said he would eliminate them if “the countries that export sugar into the U.S. get rid of theirs as well, and here’s why: Otherwise, Brazil will wipe out our agriculture and it’s not just sugar.” If we eliminate our sugar subsidies first, Rubio warned, “other countries will capture the market share, our agricultural capacity will be developed into real estate, you know, housing...

The Republican Party will continue to lose presidential elections if it comes across as mean-spirited and unwelcoming toward people of color, Donald Trump tells Newsmax. Whether intended or not, comments and policies of Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates during this election were seen by Hispanics and Asians as hostile to them, Trump says. “Republicans didn’t have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians,” the billionaire developer says. “The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it,” Trump...

SAN FRANCISCO — An elite group of security technologists has concluded that the American and British governments cannot demand special access to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger. A new paper from the group, made up of 14 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers and computer scientists, is a formidable salvo in a skirmish between intelligence and law enforcement leaders, and technologists and privacy advocates. After Edward J. Snowden’s revelations — with security breaches and awareness of nation-state surveillance at a record high and data moving online at breakneck speeds — encryption has...

"You know what happened to all those folks who invested in my Trump Hotels and Casinos??? Well, once I'm elected, that is EXACTLY WHAT'S GONNA HAPPEN TO THE MEXICANS AND CHINESE!!!!"

Between Chris Christie and Senator Warren (D-MA), Social Security reform is getting more media coverage today than at any time in the past 30 years. From hearing the details, you might conclude they are talking about different government programs. They aren’t. These people are part of the changing debate that is taking shape in Washington. For decades, any problem that developed within Social Security was fixed by shifting the cost to future workers. Today that isn’t possible. What is the problem? Social Security contains a massive imbalance between resources and promises. The Trustees of the Social Security’s Trust Funds estimate...

"DISK BOOT FAILURE - Insert system disk and press enter" Doing just that produces no result. I've tried booting with the system disk I used to install W7 on this machine, and with two repair disks created on other 32 bit W7 machines, and get the "This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible" message with them all. I have a Windows PE install on a flash drive which will boot and let me in to look at the drives. I've been able to copy all the files from the boot partition to another USB drive, and run chkdsk...

The late, great Eric Hoffer once said that, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Some people have started to wonder whether that’s happened to groups in the conservative movement – and that’s understandable. Reports about sleazy activities by conservative groups have not exactly been in short supply over the last couple of years. Damaging stories have popped up on the Daily Beast[1], Mother Jones[2], Washington Post[3], the Politico[4] and at the Daily Caller[5] among other outlets. Additionally, for those of us who have a lot of friends in the Tea...

<p>It happened on Thursday night. I went out to my car. I climbed inside. I turned the key in the ignition. And … nothing. Well, not quite nothing. A failed start. A check engine light. And an ominous warning message that said: TRANSMISSION FAULT: LIMITED GEARS AVAILABLE.</p>

This post appears in a combox on National Review's website. It is so good, so thorough, that I could not help but want to share it with FR. 1) Don't start a war you don't intend to finish. 2) Don't dream it's possible to start a war and have it go anywhere productive without lots of civilian deaths. 3) Don't buy into Keynes's theory that war is good for the economy. On all his big ideas, including this one, history has proven Keynes wrong. 4) The bump in political popularity a president gets at the beginning of a war is...

Earlier today I had an exchange with a reader – who I respect a great deal – who doesn’t agree with my Twitter argument about the folly of conservatives staying home and not voting this cycle (or any cycle, really). His Republican governor agreed to expand Medicaid coverage, as permitted under the Obamacare law, and he finds that a deep betrayal. I can’t argue with that. If the issue of expanding Medicaid is your line in the sand – and there are good reasons for that! – then you have every right in the world to say, “I can’t vote...

A whopping 68 percent of Americans think there should be a law that prohibits kids 9 and under from playing at the park unsupervised, despite the fact that most of them no doubt grew up doing just that. What's more: 43 percent feel the same way about 12-year-olds. They would like to criminalize all pre-teenagers playing outside on their own (and, I guess, arrest their no-good parents). Those are the results of a Reason/Rupe poll confirming that we have not only lost all confidence in our kids and our communities—we have lost all touch with reality. "I doubt there has...

If someone invented the ability to copy food, or copy oil, there would be riots in the streets if everyone couldn’t have all the food and oil they wanted. And today, with MASSIVE political upside to conservatives: We can promise the have-nots ALL the movies for FREE. We can promise them ALL the video games for FREE. We can promise them a copy of EVERY song for FREE. We can promise them a copy of EVERY single college course taught at an Ivy League school for FREE Conservatives should & ought to do this. We should do this because the...

Over the next few days, I will cover a variety of issues I believe explain what happened in Ohio in 2012. The first issue starts at the very beginning of the process in Ohio. Now, it is always tricky to extrapolate primary data to general-election data, but I believe two data points, discussed below, from Ohio’s primary foreshadowed problems for Republicans and in the base with Governor Mitt Romney. First, in the 2008 fully contested Democratic primary between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, 2,386,945 Ohioans cast ballots. Remember, Ohio has open primaries where voters select either a Democratic...

......The housing debacle was not the result of “a spontaneous outbreak of private irresponsibility.” Public institutions and policies provided occasions and incentives for the exercise of private vices. Washington pays up to 80 percent of state Medicaid expenses, so state citizens demand more Medicaid services. Although the elderly consider Social Security and Medicare benefits earned, Greve says: “Most retirees could not have earned their expected payment streams if they had worked two or three jobs.” “Our politics,” says Greve, “aims at inspiration on the cheap.” We should reduce government’s complicity in illusions by, for example, sending retirees “a statement showing the...