Free Republic

Obamacare, the left’s grand attempt to create a national government-run health care system, has failed. They promised lower health insurance premiums, but delivered higher ones. They promised more choice and competition, but delivered less. They promised continuity and better access to care, but delivered disruption and dislocation. Despite promises that people could keep their plans and doctors, thousands of Americans were forced into more expensive insurance with higher deductibles and plans that didn’t include their doctors. After spending billions in tax dollars, Obamacare managed to increase the number of people with health insurance by much less than predicted—with over 80...

The New York Times blasted out the headline yesterday, Obama Pursuing Climate Accord in Lieu of Treaty. In short, Obama will use one or more Executive Orders to entangle the U.S. in a global treaty on climate change, without consulting the U.S. Senate. However, the Constitution requires the Senate to vote on all treaties and the bar is high: It takes a two-third vote to approve. The Constitution is out. The Rule of law has collapsed. Reflexive law has surpassed it all. The balance of this article will show you how and why.If you are saying “Huh?”, you had better...

According to new deal historians, capitalism failed in the 1930s. What, then, is it doing flourishing in the United States, Britain, and Europe and taking root in Latin America and China, where it was never previously present? For the past 20 years there has been a large and growing incompatibility between the verdicts of historians and the performance of capitalism.In 1981 the United States reduced tax rates and reined in money growth. For two decades the economy has experienced an economic boom characterized by large income gains, high employment, and negligible inflation. In the U.K. similar reforms introduced by Margaret...

Did you know that some of your local elected representatives are enabling a shadow government to evolve? These people promote the reinvention of government through their support of, and appointments to, “regional” boards that act like soviet councils. These councils are funded to implement Agenda 21. Federal tax dollars fuel their appeal, but your city and county representatives do not have to go along. Gone are the days when government was limited, where individuals were politically acknowledged to possess unalienable rights, and where money was honest. The American political structure has been transformed. This has occurred quietly for more than...

Two-hundred years after signing a declaration protecting Americans’ right to pursue life, liberty and property, the stewards of the very government our Founders formed, began stealing all three.The story of why and how our government, through federal agencies like HUD and the EPA implement global law is the story of America’s return to slavery.To understand the importance of the story we must first recognize the importance of property rights.For example, if you own a farm, but another person tells you what to plant, where you can mow, and whom you must have for neighbors, your ownership becomes worthless.  That other...

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." - Obama, July 2, 2008 What objectives? Who set them? This may begin to answer those questions, raise other questions, and perhaps point toward things needing further research. Organization of Islamic Cooperation - Criminalization of "Islamophobia" In 1990 the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) issued their “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam” (http://www.oic-oci.org/english/article/human.htm). It’s Article 22 states: “Everyone shall...

AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing), President Obama’s most radical regulation, continues to go virtually unmentioned in the campaign. You might think a policy that allows big cities to swallow up and control surrounding suburbs would be widely debated and discussed, especially in an election where the suburbs hold the balance of power. Instead, both presidential candidates make a point of avoiding the issue. Meanwhile, it’s become increasingly clear that AFFH is about a great deal more than housing. In truth, this sweepingly transformative regulation creates levers by which the feds can reach into almost every aspect of local government. In...

Dear Colleagues: As the Secretaries of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of Transportation... Today, our agencies are calling on local education, transportation, and housing leaders to work together on issues at the intersection of our respective missions in helping to guarantee full access of opportunity across the country.

On June 16, 2009, EPA joined with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U. S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to help improve access to affordable housing, more transportation options, and lower transportation costs while protecting the environment in communities nationwide. Through a set of guiding livability principles and a partnership agreement that will guide the agencies' efforts, this partnership will coordinate federal housing, transportation, and other infrastructure investments to protect the environment, promote equitable development, and help to address the challenges of climate change.

Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. The ultimate goal [] is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts...

Farmers in the U.S. are pouring out tens of millions of gallons of excess milk, amid a massive glut that has slashed prices and has filled warehouses with cheese. More than 43 million gallons’ worth of milk were dumped in fields, manure lagoons or animal feed, or have been lost on truck routes or discarded at plants in the first eight months of 2016, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is enough milk to fill 66 Olympic swimming pools, and the most wasted in at least 16 years of data requested by The Wall Street Journal....

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has promised to nationalize food distribution in the South American nation beset with record shortages of basic goods, runaway inflation and an escalating economic crisis. [Snip] Various estimates suggest the government already controls about half of the country's food distribution, but that hasn't stopped record shortages in shops and markets. Venezuela is struggling with a recession, 68.5-percent annual inflation and severe shortages of the basic goods that it relies on oil money to import. On any given day, people in Venezuela can wait hours to get some subsidized milk, cooking oil, milk or flour -- if...

Most of life happens without a central planner. Yet people think we need one. Suppose you'd never seen a skating rink, and I told you that I want to lay down some ice and charge people money to strap sharp blades on their feet. They will zip around on the ice -- young and old, skilled and unskilled. My only rule: Go counter-clockwise. Hillary Clinton would say the rink needs regulation. She calls herself "a government junkie." Government junkies like government plans. Hillary'd probably demand that my rink have an official who tells skaters when to zoom left or right,...

President Obama repeatedly assures us that this will be his “year of action.” (snip).... Yet not a word has been heard of late about a truly transformative Obama executive action, his rule on “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH). That rule will push Americans into living how and where the federal government wants. It promises to gut the ability of suburbs to set their own zoning codes. It will press future population growth into tiny, densely-packed high-rise zones around public transportation, urbanizing suburbs and Manhattanizing cities. You won’t see a more ambitious Obama administration initiative than this. Yet Obama never discusses...

Having traveled to well over 100 countries, I have seen some pretty shocking signs of poverty around the world.In parts of Asia, it’s not uncommon for parents in poor villages to sell their children for bags of rice… or for children to be stolen outright and sold as orphans to unsuspecting foreigners.In Africa, I’ve seen people who are so destitute they intentionally mangle and gash their own bodies just to give themselves good cause to shock foreign tourists into donations.But I’d have to rank poverty in Cuba as the most extreme.Going to Cuba is like going back in time....

The just-published NIPCC reports may lead to a paradigm shift about what or who causes current climate changes. All the evidence suggests that Nature rules the climate – not Man. Watch for it: We may be on the threshold of a tipping point in climate history. No, I’m not talking about a tipping point in the sense that the Earth will be covered with ice or become hellishly hot. I’m talking about a tipping point in our views of what controls the climate -- whether it’s mainly humans or whether it’s mainly natural. It makes an enormous difference in climate...

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855-1857) CHAPTER 10. Containing the whole Science of Government Mr Arthur Clennam, scion of a merchant family, seeks to intervene with the Government to assist William Dorrit, held in Marshalsea prison for debt for more than twenty-five years.   Mr Meagles is a successful banker, retired, with whose family Mr Clennam shared confinement in quarantine for some weeks at Marseilles.   Daniel Doyce is a successful inventor but unsuccessful as a patent applicant for more than twelve years. The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public...

Last Thursday, thanks largely to Senator Pam Roach (R-Auburn), the Washington State Senate provided an opportunity to discuss the Growth Management Act (GMA) in a public work session. Last year, I wrote about a less formal work session held by Representative Dean Takko (D-Longview). However, the recent Senate work session demonstrated notable willingness to look at Washington State’s GMA in a comprehensive manner without constraining the comments of those who testified.

The central government is set to ease the design requirements for tobacco stores as a response to the recent wave of robberies targeted at the units, commercial broadcaster RTL Klub has reported.

... The Federal Reserve is the most important economic planning agency in the world. It's charged with promoting full employment, stabilizing prices, and overseeing the financial sector. So the new chair's theoretical views, management style, and personality quirks could affect trillions of dollars of economic activity. Is it wise to hand such extraordinary power to an elite cadre of economists and bureaucrats? The pretenses of top-down planning have been debunked by history. Throughout the last century, every nation that adopted central planning had its economy flounder. Even at the microeconomic level, the limits of top-down planning are increasingly obvious.