Free Republic

How the free market gets blamed for cronyism. Words have specific meanings. Unfortunately, capitalism is frequently misused by supporters and critics alike. Too often, what people defend or condemn is not free-market capitalism at all. Although distinctions exist among capitalism, free enterprise, and free market, for the purposes of this essay, I use capitalism to mean free-market capitalism: an economic system based on private property, voluntary exchange, competition, freedom of entry and association, and freedom of contract—including wages negotiated without government-imposed minimums. Government’s role is that of a referee: protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and preventing force and fraud, not...

"Tell me who Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was," Yura, a character in Vladimir Sorokin's short story "The Red Pyramid," asks a man who mysteriously appears at a train station. The stranger responds, "The man who called forth the pyramid of the red roar." The pyramid, the man continues, is the "source of the endless red roar." Visible to a select few, it "emits a different kind of sound wave" in order to "infect the world to destroy mankind's intrinsic structure." Sorokin, a modern Russian writer, who in this short story takes on the subject of communism and its legacy in modern...

This is long, but I think it is important. We are fighting Leftists in the government and media who exclaim the virtues of Socialism, but we forget that there are legions of young people that the Left has been mercilessly (and without consequence to them) indoctrinating young people for decades without any countervailing information. This encounter I detail in this thread shows just how much and how prevalent this is. It was (for me) my first chance to drill down on young people to see just how deep and fervent their indoctrinated beliefs are. Last Saturday we had a festival...

Liberal female blames capitalism for America's problems and then she's asked, "How does capitalism cause the problems in this country?" and "What is capitalism?" She has no idea and can't answer the questions.

Speaking of South America, there’s a freedom revolution going on down there that is liberating and pro-growth. Many of our neighbors to the south are shrinking governments, opening markets, and prioritizing growth and stability. Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia are governed by conservative leaders. Ironically, this is all happening as the Left in America moves toward South Americanesque socialist policies. Brazil, with its 214 million people, will decide next month if they will join this wave. Incumbent Lula da Silva, the “last man standing” among South America’s leftist leaders, is tied in polls with Flavio Bolsonaro, the...

Young voters are financially drowning — and the life raft the Democratic Socialists of America is throwing them is an anchor in disguise. If Americans don’t see past this facade, they’ll be sinking even faster. ========= Young voters are right that the system is failing them. They’re wrong, though, about which system it is. What they’ve experienced isn’t free-market capitalism at all — it’s a quasi-socialist economy that’s let government displace the market in precisely the spending categories that have become least affordable. Turning further toward socialism means embracing the anchor that’s already weighing them down. Just look at where...

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is not a publication most would be familiar with. It is meant as a repository of overviews of big topics in philosophy broadly defined, inclusive of political theory. As such, entries added to it are unlikely to generate strong responses by the experts deeply familiar with each individual entry. Every rule has exceptions though.Image Credit: Custom image by FEE Recently, Chiara Cordelli, a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, delivered her "three years in the making" commissioned piece on "capitalism." The piece went viral. The reason that it sparked such attention is that it...

Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico spoke of “dismantling” capitalism while dismissing the future of Texas’ oil and gas industry during a 2020 climate forum, newly resurfaced video shows. The comments, first reported by CNN, came during a virtual candidate forum hosted by the Austin Sierra Club while Talarico was serving his first term in the Texas House. During the forum, Talarico was asked what lawmakers could do to address the effects of climate change on minority communities. “I am so thankful that you asked this question, and also thankful that young activists have really drawn the link between climate...

What would Karl Marx think of his latter-day disciples in the Democratic Socialists of America? No doubt he would find their politics largely agreeable, but they would present him with a class conundrum. DSA is not a movement of workers but of people with intellectual credentials: some 80 percent of its members have college degrees and 35 percent have advanced degrees. Those credentials are all granted by the institutions that capitalists sustain – it’s not bricklayers who endow Harvard University. State colleges and universities depend on government funding, but government itself, under capitalism, is simply an instrument of business interests....

What do New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Alexander Soros—George Soros’s son and heir—have in common? A shared ideological inspiration: Slavoj Žižek, the self-proclaimed “left-fascist” who seeks the West’s bloody destruction. This should chill every American. Zizek has been described as “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.” His agenda is summed up in his publisher’s description of his 2008 book, In Defense of Lost Causes: “Žižek argues the case for revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The “lost causes” he wants to revive and succeed are those of the Bolsheviks, Mao Tse-tung, and Robespierre. The Iranian...

“What would it be like to live in a world without Capitalism?” a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leader asks, before describing her party’s vision of creating a workers’ paradise – where people don’t have to work, because they don’t have bills, and are free to do whatever they like. In an hour-long video laying out DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” program launch published Wednesday, DSA’s National Political Education Chair Michaela Brangan portrays Democratic Socialism as the author of a worry-free society that enables people to do as they please: “What would it be like to live in a world without...

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is setting up an automated process for parents to obtain Trump Accounts for their children. These Accounts can be established for newborns and children who have a valid Social Security number up until they reach the age of 18. A one-time $1,000 pilot program contribution from the Department of Treasury is available to children born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028, who are US citizens with a valid Social Security number. So far, six million children have been enrolled in Trump Accounts. SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano explained "Social Security numbers are the backbone...

Trump said in the post on Wednesday: "The big Oil Companies are not dropping their price at the pump commensurate with the sharply lower prices they are paying for Oil. "Those prices are dropping like a rock! In other words, customers are being 'gouged.'" He added that he had ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) to "immediately start looking into this".

In 2019, 14-year-old Amira Hawat boarded a plane with her family from Venezuela to the United States believing her mother’s promise: she was headed to Disney World. What she didn’t know was that she would never return home. Today, seven years later, the Lipscomb University student speaks publicly about her experiences growing up in Venezuela. Her family fled the country after socialist policies led them to close their two small businesses, and she’s warning American students the same type of thing could happen here. “Socialism is a fairytale: perfect in theory, but horrible in practice and reality,” she told The...

Pope Leo XIV, in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, compressed here from Paragraphs 163-168, asserts that:“More than ever, in the age of AI and robotics, it is no longer possible to rely solely on the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Politics has the task of orientating economies and technologies to the common good ... to ensure equity: taxation, social protection and industrial policies must correct the imbalances created by the concentration of wealth and power” (emphasis mine). Can the Pope reasonably hope to achieve these aims by relegating Adam Smith’s invisible hand illustration to the dust bin of history? Pope...

My thesis is that the large-scale demographic replacement of White European populations is the logical and nearly inevitable outcome of the fusion between (i) liberal universalism, which delegitimizes ethnic particularism and prohibits state preference for one culture in favor of diversity and value pluralism, and (ii) post-Fordist (including limbic) capitalist optimization, which demands flexible, low-cost, compliant non-Western labor, expanding global markets, and short-to-medium-term gains. Together, these two self-reinforcing logics have created a dynamic, high-level equilibrium and path-dependent civilizational trap that is quite effective at delivering GDP growth, opportunities for elite status, rewards for loyalty, and moral validation, yet systematically undermines...

Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism.” Although the Left frequently exaggerates and overemphasizes the evils of corporate America, proponents of the free market often find themselves in the awkward position of defending the status quo of state capitalism, which is in fact a common adversary of the free marketer and the anti-corporate leftist, even if the latter misdiagnoses the problem and proposes the wrong solutions... Indeed, corporatism, implemented by the state — whether through direct handouts, corporate bailouts, eminent domain, licensing laws, antitrust regulations, or environmental edicts...

Sleep is critical to being in good health, regulating how people think and informing everything from mood to physical health. But the country’s lack of sleep is a problem for everyone, even for those lucky Americans who are able to get enough shut-eye. In addition to individual health, insufficient sleep creates a drag on medical spending, workplace productivity, and long-term health outcomes. America’s chronic inability to get enough sleep comes with a real cost attached, one that researchers have put in the hundreds of billions of dollars in annual economic losses. The other culprit is the thing that makes the...

The site Responsible Statecraft says some kind of deal with Cuba seems to be getting closer, though the U.S. might be running out of time to get the kind of deal it wanted. div class="thm-piano-mop">Even as U.S. President Donald Trump vows to usher in a “new dawn” for Cuba, possibly through military force, his administration is pursuing high-level diplomatic talks that seem to be producing some concrete results.Over the weekend, the New York Times and AP confirmed reporting by Axios that a U.S. government plane with a senior State Department delegation landed in Havana on April 10 for direct talks...

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and first lady Rama Duwaji have been invited to the Met Gala — but won’t be attending, sources tell Page Six. New York City’s mayor is traditionally invited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the lavish event every year, but we’re told that Mamdani, 34, won’t be joining Condé Nast’s Anna Wintour and her coterie of celeb guests on Monday, May 4. “He’s not coming,” said a source. “And it would be foolish if he did … can you imagine? It goes against everything he believes in.” Indeed, the event is being financially subsidized by Amazon...