Free Republic

Politicians and lawyers pretend that they are important people doing important work. But often they're important because they are parasites. They feed off others, while creating no wealth of their own. We all complain about businesses we don't like, but because business is voluntary, every merchant must offer us something we want in order to get our money. But that's not true for politicians and their businessman cronies. They get to use government force to grab our money. Those people who take instead of producing things make up "the parasite economy," says Cato Institute Vice President David Boaz. It's my...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Kremlin-backed Russia Today news network has rolled out a provocative ad campaign that takes a sharp poke at U.S. media and the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The pitch is aimed at convincing Americans of the merits of Russia Today - or RT - as an alternate news source to U.S. networks. Featuring a stylized image of former U.S Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations, one ad reads: "This is what happens when there is no second opinion. Iraq War: No WMDs. 141, 802 civilian deaths." The campaign includes two other...

Last week, the New York Times reported that the Census Bureau would be significantly changing the questions and methods it uses to determine who has health insurance. The redesign is an attempt to address some of the flaws in the current design that have long troubled the agency. A working paper from the Census Bureau had found that it provided an “inflated estimate of the uninsured” and was prone to “measurement errors” that diminished the reliability and usefulness of the measure. The timing of this change could hardly be worse. The massive coverage provisions of the health care reform have...

SANTA FE, N.M. – For decades, it’s probably the most troublesome question facing education: Why are results for U.S. public school students so mediocre, despite the billions of taxpayer dollars spent? Andrew Coulson thinks he’s got the answer: Because there is no discernible correlation between spending and outcomes. “The takeaway from this study is that what we’ve done over the past 40 years hasn’t worked,” said Coulson, director of the Center For Educational Freedom at the CATO Institute. “The average performance change nationwide has declined 3 percent in mathematical and verbal skills. Moreover, there’s been no relationship, effectively, between spending...

Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.” That statement came not from a tea-party leader or a congressional Republican, but from Bono, singer, celebrity, and global anti-poverty activist, speaking to Georgetown’s Global Social Enterprise Initiative last year. As we mark the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street this week, it is worth recalling just how much Bono is right and OWS, at its anti-capitalist core, is deeply and profoundly wrong. Occupy Wall Street did have a point when it took to criticizing the crony capitalism that helped precipitate the economic crisis of 2008 and the recession that...

As we head into a potential government shutdown over the funding of Obamacare, the iconoclastic junior senator from Texas — love him or hate him — continues to stride across the national stage. With his presidential aspirations as big as everything in his home state, by now many know what has never been a secret: Ted Cruz was born in Canada. But does that mean that Cruz’s presidential ambitions are gummed up with maple syrup or stuck in snowdrifts altogether different from those plaguing the Iowa caucuses? Are the birthers now hoist on their own petards, having been unable to...

Many have speculated that the Obama administration isn’t prepared to roll out ObamaCare. Some have speculated that even if the administration were prepared, the rollout would still be chaotic with job losses, rate shock, employer dumping, and the like. But since the Obama administration has been remarkably secretive about the status of its implementation efforts, no one has a better perspective on its preparedness, and the potential for chaos, than the administration itself. That’s why the decision to delay the implementation of ObamaCare’s employer mandate for one year is so illuminating. Implementing the law without the employer mandate will definitely...

I feel sorry for the people of California.  They’re in a state that faces a very bleak future.And why does the Golden State have a not-so-golden outlook?Because interest groups have effective control of state and local political systems and they use their power to engage in massive rip-offs of taxpayers. One of the main problems is that there’s a bloated government workforce that gets wildly overcompensated. Here are some staggering examples.A state nurse getting $331,000 of annual compensation.A county administrator getting $423,000 pensions.A state psychiatrist getting $822,000 of annual compensation.Cops that get $188,000 of annual compensation.A city manager getting $800,000...

The IRS has announced it will postpone the start date of Obamacare’s “employer mandate” from 2014 to 2015. Most of the reaction has focused on how this move is an implicit acknowledgement that Obamacare is harmful, cannot work, and will prove a liability for Democrats going into the November 2014 elections. The Washington Post called the decision a “fresh setback” and a “significant interruption” to the law’s implementation. John McDonough, a prominent supporter of the law, observes, “You’ve given the employer community a sense of confidence that maybe they can kill this. If I were an employer, I would smell blood...

One of history’s worst butchers, Josef Stalin, is rumored to have said that, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”Sadly, there’s probably some truth in that statement.I’ve shared a bunch of horror stories about the U.K.’s government-run healthcare system (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) and I challenge you to read them without feeling some mix of anger, sadness, despair, and disgust.Now read these passages from a story earlier this year in the UK-based Daily Mail. As many as 1,165 people starved to death in NHS hospitals over the...

The Supreme Court punted on the University of Texas affirmative action case the other day. But the issue won't seem to go away - except in California. California? Yes, California. Although seen as a bastion of liberalism in the public mind, the state passed proposition 209, banning affirmative action, 17 years ago. So what happened? Are California university campuses today completely lily white? Or all Asian? Hardly. As explained in a study for the Cato Institute, with the exception of one or two "elite" institutions, California university campuses are more diverse today than before the ban, and the graduation rates...

I’ve repeatedly explained that Keynesian economics doesn’t work because any money the government spends must first be diverted from the productive sector of the economy, which means either higher taxes or more red ink. So unless one actually thinks that politicians spend money with high levels of effectiveness and efficiency, this certainly suggests that growth will be stronger when the burden of government spending is modest (and if spending is concentrated on “public goods,” which do have a positive “rate of return” for the economy). I’ve also complained (to the point of being a nuisance!) that there are too many...

Among the right-leaning policy wonks and intellectuals in Washington, there’s a lot of attention being given to the something called “reform conservatism.”Underlying this school of thought is the notion that the Reagan-era message no longer works since Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the last six elections.A few people have asked my opinion about this movement, and since Ross Douthat of the New York Times just put together a good description of this school of thought, it makes it easy for me to offer my thoughts.But before digging into his column, I think that some of...

Thomas Torres, age 54, was the target of a Connecticut State Police SWAT raid shortly before Christmas two years ago. The Spanish-speaking, subsidized housing resident of New Haven was living in a building infested with drug dealers and prostitutes. He kept his door closed unless given a damn good reason to do otherwise. He didn’t have the drugs the police were looking for and told them so, repeatedly, despite the language barrier, after the raiding party knocked down his door. What followed was the trashing of his apartment and a physical altercation between the unarmed middle-aged man on disability and...

The media’s harboring of a pro-government spending bias isn’t exactly news. But an article in Politico is notable because it illustrates the tendency for local newsrooms to push human interest stories that emphasize the pain of spending cuts. According to the article, it’s pervasive:  Journalists from Florida to Washington state told POLITICO that their editors are hungry for stories that turn bureaucratic doublespeak about automatic cuts into a human story of real-world pain—from layoffs to cutbacks in treasured hometown programs.  Ask Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, who got hit with a question about the Blue Angels during a Jacksonville TV station...

Republicans believed a Mitt Romney win would seal Obamacare's fate. Democrats - or rather, the lonely two-fifths of Americans who support the president's beleaguered healthcare law - believed an Obama win would secure its future. Both sides were kidding themselves.Romney may have pledged to repeal the law, but his positions on Obamacare had the life span of a rainbow. He supported an identical law when he got the credit for signing it as governor of Massachusetts. He then opposed Obamacare when that's what GOP primary voters wanted to hear, and later endorsed parts of it when he thought that's what...

“Government ’help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.” That is what Ayn Rand has to say about government involvement in the world of business, but the full extent of this practice is difficult to nail down. Tad DeHaven of the CATO Institute investigated the situation to determine exactly how deep the problem runs. Periodically, CATO analyzes the federal budget to ascertain exactly how much money our government shovels out to favored parties. Unfortunately, over the years both parties have...

There is a chorus of calls for Ron Paul to get out of the race because "he's not a true Republican." The Koch Brothers are trying to take over the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, and morph it into more of a conservative attack machine. You'll hear people call the Libertarians "GOP lite." Folks will accuse libertarians of siphoning votes unnecessarily from Republicans, helping to elect Democrats. Is this just a case of semantics, or disgruntled Republicans joining up with a new party just to win a nomination that they couldn't capture within the GOP? Or is there a deep...

Like many in the liberty movement, I’m disheartened by the current goings-on involving the Cato Institute, namely, the power struggle between, on one side, Cato’s co-founder and President Ed Crane, and on the other side Charles and David Koch. (Of course, there are many other people on each side of this dispute, but these are the main representatives of each side.) The immediate source of this dispute is the disposition of the shares in Cato that belonged to former Cato Chairman Bill Niskanen, who died late last year. The Kochs believe that they, the Kochs, are entitled to those shares;...

Last week, Cato Institute health care policy expert Michael Cannon testified before the Missouri Senate’s Interim Committee on Health Insurance Exchanges on why that state should not create an Obamacare exchange. His arguments apply just as much to Michigan, including this excerpt describing how creating an exchange will help entrench Obamacare. From testimony delivered on Sept. 15, 2011 Some opponents of the law nevertheless argue for creating an exchange so that states can be prepared in case the law is not overturned or repealed. Yet creating an exchange would entrench the law and make it less likely to be repealed...