Free Republic

Mercifully, the political conventions have ended. The political press will keep buzzing over whether Clint Eastwood's unconventional speech helped or hurt Mitt Romney and whether the snafu over Israel and God in the Democratic platform will do any lasting damage to President Obama. Republican reporters will think former President Clinton talked too long, and Democrats will note that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie talked more about himself than about Romney. But they are missing the point. The campaign is about what's happening in America, not what the politicians are saying. At the beginning of 2012, it was easy to note...

[SNIP]... Intellectual discourse is, of course, extraordinarily valuable in reaching truth. In this sense, I welcome the opportunity to discuss my views on the economy and monetary policy and how they may differ with those of you here at the Fed. That said, I suspect my views are so different from those of you here today that my comments will be a complete failure in convincing you to do what I believe should be done, which is to close down the entire Federal Reserve System. My views, I suspect, differ from beginning to end... [SNIP]... I stand here confused as...

A closer look at the shale gas story challenges both conservative and liberal policy preferences and points to much-needed reforms for today's mash of state and federal clean energy subsidies and mandates. In his State of the Union address, President Obama invoked the 30-year history of federal support for new shale gas drilling technologies to defend his present day investments in green energy. Obama stressed the value of shale gas—which will create thousands of jobs and billions in profits—as part of his "all of the above" approach to energy, and defended the critical role government investment has always played in...

{snip} Janet Daley wrote a blistering column for The Daily Telegraph over the weekend entitled “Barack Obama is trying to make the US a more socialist state.” In the piece, Daley writes that the days of the world looking to the United States for leadership are over: {snip} Listening to the President’s State of the Union message last week was like a surreal visit to our own recent past: there were, almost word for word, all those interminable Gordon Brown Budgets that preached ‘fairness’ while listing endless new ways in which central government would intervene in every form of economic...

The alarm bells are now ringing for the Federal Housing Administration, with delinquencies increasing. The immediate and pressing issue is the safety and soundness of the FHA today and the risk it poses to the taxpayer. In a paper entitled “Too Early to Sound the FHA Alarm,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) comes to the defense of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the troubled federal housing entity. In doing so, CAP sounds eerily similar to Representative Barney Frank’s position regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003: “I do think I do not want the same kind of focus...

Obama is a national embarrassment and each day proves himself even more incapable of honestly confronting the nation’s urgent issues.  Just days ago, Americans were once again left gob-smacked as Obama beat the drums for the SAVE awards, his signature effort to cut the $1.4 trillion annual deficit.    This Obama initiative hopes to demonstrate the president’s commitment to fiscal sanity by cutting wasteful spending. The basic idea of the SAVE awards is a good one.  Federal employees are encouraged to identify and propose cost-saving ideas and to finger poorly performing programs that should be cut.  With an almost $4 trillion...

Just when you thought Keynesian economics was finally dead among Republicans, Mitt Romney announces two prominent New Keynesian academics, Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard, as the heart of his economic team. So if you loved how Obama has managed to continue the flawed economics of the Bush administration*, you’ll feel pretty safe with Romney. Sadly the real problem goes beyond Romney and Obama. The financial crisis and the government’s response to it illustrate the failure of much of mainstream macroeconomics. Yes, the Romney team would have had its stimulus proposal tilted more toward temporary tax cuts, but it still would...

So what example should America follow, that of deficit-slaughtering, budget-cutting, seriously limited government in Texas, which has added 730,000 jobs in the past decade, or that of regulation-happy, spend-mercilessly, owe-everything, flee-this-place-quickly California, which has lost 600,000 jobs during the same period? While not a hard question [...] let's continue to look at some astounding facts about Texas after noting a much-repeated analysis of how it got there. It has no state income tax, low corporate taxes, does just enough regulating to get the job done, cares for the environment without making a fetish of it, lets its legislature meet for...

Part of a series on “green jobs” in Europe, this article focuses on Italy. Italy has been another early European leader in wind and solar power deployment. But a study performed by Luciano Lavecchia and Carlo Stagnaro of Italy’s Bruno Leoni Institute found serious problems with the Italian experience; in particular, that capital spent on green energy was vastly less efficient at creating jobs.Finally, we have compared the average stock of capital per worker in the RES [Renewable Energy Sector] with the average stock of capital per worker in the industry and the entire economy, finding an average ratio...

Pursuing a new green energy economy in the United Kingdom has led to lost jobs and higher energy prices. President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and other political luminaries such as Arnold Schwarzenegger promise us a bright green future, but let’s look at how things have worked out in Europe, where green energy has been tested extensively. Does green energy lead to green jobs? This article is the second in a series that will look Europe’s experience. This time, we focus on the United Kingdom.Our Commonwealth cousins across the pond have also embraced the “green power...

California ranks near the bottom on some studies that claim to measure the business climate, yet the state’s economic growth is about the same as the nation’s from 1978 to 2008. Why? some researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California in San Francisco wondered. PPIC found, in a study of 11 major state rankings, that the ones that measure productivity and quality of life have little relationship to a state’s economic growth. The rankings that measure taxes and the cost of doing business do correlate somewhat to a state’s job and wage growth. But get this: “The factors that...

“The Congressional Budget Office’s report exposes the widening gulf between the President’s rhetoric and his budget’s reality,” said Ryan. “Simply put, the President’s budget spends too much, taxes too much, and borrows too much-and it continues to heap an unsustainable burden of debt on American families, today and in the future.”

Renewing the threat: those in Congress smart enough to reject cap-and-trade should be smart enough to reject it again, even if it is couched in different language. Now that cap-and-trade (emission trading to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) is more or less off the table, our politicians are starting to talk about something else—or, at least, something that looks like something else.There are various names for this alternative scheme, from renewable energy portfolio standards to clean energy standards to green energy standards. All of them basically involve the same thing: the government mandates that a certain percentage of electricity that utilities...

In September 1933, the Agriculture Adjustment Administration in an effort to raise the prices of commodities slaughtered six million young pigs. With unemployment hovering at 22.9%, the homeless numbers rising each day, in the middle of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's economic policy to drive up prices in order to help the farmer resulted in the slaughtering of six million pigs. Never mind that millions of Americans went to bed hungry each night, six million pigs were sacrificed to the economic experiment of FDR and his advisers. Not only did the poor and hungry not get to eat those pigs,...

"Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It's not worth a thing unless it's spread around, encouraging young things to grow." Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly! It's true. Growth is good. Growth is what has distinguished America over the centuries. It is also true redistribution is bad. Redistribution is what defined the failed Soviet Union. Dividing up an increasingly smaller pie doesn't take you very far. Dolly Levi knew it. John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan knew it. So did ole Silent Cal Coolidge. Now would someone please tell Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi? Mr. Obama's redistributionist tendencies were well...

Increasing productivity in healthcare is difficult but not impossible. Here's how. The president tells us that we should be “bending the cost curve” on healthcare, and politicans everywhere are scrambling to present their favored pork projects as plans that would do just that. Lobbyists of every stripe and color are storming legislative offices with great wads of dead presidents and the commentariat debates angels dancing upon pinheads: that is, what could be done if we had a legislative system without legislators, pork, lobbyists, or dead presidents printed on pieces of paper.What I have yet to see (and apologies to those...

Japan’s historic election Sunday gave the Democratic Party an overwhelming victory over the Liberal Democrats that have dominated Japan’s government for 55 years.  The Liberal Democrats oversaw Japan’s industrial policy that supported Japan’s dominant firms during Japan’s rise as a major economic power during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.  Indeed, many American economists argued the U.S. should do more to emulate Japanese industrial policy and have the government actively involved in supporting dominant corporations to enhance their international competitiveness.American support for industrial policy, where the government actively picks the winners in economic competition, died off in the 1990s when the...

Remember how the left kept screeching that Bush had alienated our allies and enraged our enemies? Remember how they said that Barack Obama would make the world love us again? Well, the Democrats get to wear their soiled underwear over their own heads, now. Because now we get to see on a nearly daily basis just how truly full of pure partisan garbage they have been for years. N. Korea Says It Conducted 2nd Nuclear TestSEOUL, South Korea — North Korea announced Monday that it successfully carried out a second underground nuclear test, less than two months after launching a...

I happen to go to recovery.gov today and saw a chart of the jobs planned to be created or "saved" - they plan to create or "save" 106,000 jobs in Georgia. Not 105,000 and not 107,000 - precisely 106,000. How could their planning possibly be so precise? After staring at the data for a few minutes, I realized the terrible truth. California - 396,000 Texas - 269,000 New York - 215,000 Florida - 206,000 Illinois - 148,000 Pennsylvania - 143,000 Ohio - 133,000 Michigan - 109,000 Georgia - 106,000 North Carolina - 105,000 Do you see the pattern? Pull 3,500,000...

Czech PM does not regret ‘road to hell’ row By Tony Barber in Prague Published: May 7 2009 08:55 | Last updated: May 7 2009 08:55 Mirek Topolanek, the outgoing Czech prime minister, says he has no regrets about condemning US economic policies as a potential “road to hell” in spite of the deep embarrassment his remarks caused the European Union. In an interview with the Financial Times, he also said that, if he could have done one thing differently during the four months he steered the EU’s affairs, it would have been to rein in the free-ranging Middle East...