Free Republic

President Jacob Zumahas called on parliament to change South Africa’s constitution to allow the expropriation of white owned land without compensation. Mr Zuma, 74, who made the remarks in a speech yesterday/FRI morning, said he wanted to establish a “pre-colonial land audit of land use and occupation patterns” before changing the law. “We need to accept the reality that those who are in parliament where laws are made, particularly the black parties, should unite because we need a two-thirds majority to effect changes in the constitution,” he said. Mr Zuma, who has lurched from one scandal to another since being...

There’s more to Donald Trump’s Middle East trip than billion-dollar contracts, parades of camels and a storm back home over Qatar’s offer to give the president a new Air Force One. A tour narrowly billed by the White House as a chance for Trump to show he’s a master dealmaker is jumbling the region’s geopolitical jigsaw puzzle.Wherever he goes, Trump’s brings disruption that can forge possibilities. And he takes risks – for instance, his decision on this trip to lift sanctions on Syria to give a war-ravaged nation a second chance.But the move revives a perennial question about Trump’s entire...

Is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman trying to sabotage Joe Biden’s reelection bid? It’s quite possible. The Saudi leader, known as MBS, has made clear his disdain for President Biden, and his fury over insults lobbed at him by this White House. He is a powerful force behind the current surge in oil prices, which could — if sustained — contribute to Biden’s defeat. Oil prices are soaring — up 19 percent since the start of the year. Since they lag behind crude oil, gasoline prices have only jumped 14 percent so far. But, unless oil markets take a...

The average annual wage in America is $63,000 while the average annual wage in India is just $2,500—the average American earns 25x more than the average Indian. Labor is often the largest input cost for making products, accounting for approximately 30 - 35% of the cost of American manufacturing—and it’s an even higher proportion in many service industries. If America and India traded freely, India’s low wages would undercut America’s labor market—either Americans will need to accept lower wages domestically, or the factories will relocate to India to take advantage of dirt-cheap labor. How do we know this will happen?...

The grand new American reawakening has come, Trump announced with his inaugural ‘Day of Liberation’—a Declaration of Economic Independence: [pic] Experts the world over are now butting heads over what this epochal ‘reciprocal tariffs’ package will mean for the world economy. Firstly, it must be said that the misnomered program is apparently not one of ‘reciprocal’ tariffs at all, but rather tariffs doing the job of balancing ‘unequal’ trade deficits between the US and other countries. As most know by now, Trump’s team apparently used a simple equation for determining the tariff rate: Flexport's team was able to reverse engineer...

The Today show's "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" sweeps month ratings gimmick brought Lauer to Moscow's Red Square on Thursday where he repeatedly pressed Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov to trash the Bush administration's foreign policy. Lauer asked: "Was Russia right and were the Americans wrong?" on WMD in Iraq and, "Do you think the credibility of the United States and this particular administration has been damaged internationally in this last year?" Not all have succeeded in Russia's semi-free enterprise economy, but virtually all have more personal, political and religious freedom, yet Lauer suggested many were better off...

The Rio Grande Foundation’s mission can be boiled down to one core principle: the advancement of economic freedom. In its most straightforward definition, economic freedom refers to the ability of individuals and businesses to make voluntary financial decisions and engage in free-market exchanges without undue government interference. Such interference can come in many forms—taxes, subsidies, wage mandates, excessive regulations, and other barriers that restrict free enterprise and personal choice. The concept isn’t new. For decades, the Canada-based Fraser Institute has been a global leader in measuring and analyzing economic freedom through its flagship reports, Economic Freedom of the World and...

-snip- "There are things that wouldn't be pleasant in a financial sense. I can do things financially that would be very bad for Russia. I don't want to do that because I want to get peace," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "In a financial sense, yes, we could do things that would be very bad for Russia, that would be devastating for Russia. But I don't want to do that because I want to see peace. And we’re getting close to maybe getting something done. We got Ukraine done. And, as you know, Ukraine might have been the...

My last post on Tuesday has inspired a spirited debate in the comments about how federal spending should properly be accounted for in GDP. What is the right answer? After reading the comments, it occurs to me that there are several more points to make. For those criticizing or disagreeing with my post — led by prolific commenter Richard Greene — the main theme has been that many large categories of federal spending make an obvious positive contribution to the economy. Examples given include the Defense Department, teachers/education, and national parks. Surely excluding those kinds of things entirely from GDP...

Given the recent inflation surge, it is time to consider indexing capital gains for inflation. This would do more than any provision in the 2017 tax cut to create an incentive for investing in America. If the objective of the pending tax cut is to stimulate economic growth, there is a strong argument for indexing the capital-gains tax. If this election had any single defining economic issue, it was repairing the damage done by the Biden inflation.

In November 2023, the warning came, as clear as an omen. A political upstart was seeking office and, if elected, his policies were likely to cause “devastation” in his own country and “severely reduce policy space in the long run.” The threat was a chainsaw-wielding disciple of Austrian economics from Argentina who embraced laissez-faire economics. The predictions of doom came not from Old Testament prophets, but 108 economists who signed a public letter saying his anachronistic ideas had long ago been discredited. “As economists from around the world who are supportive of broad-based economic development in Argentina, we are especially...

I posted this in chat. I am unable to determine which states require not only taking but testing in economics coursework in order to graduate and obtain a high school diploma. The closest I can get annual survey of the states CES reports. And it's scary how you require economics.

Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between “economic reality” as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground. Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline. What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations?...

Former New York Times columnist and pseudo-economics savant Paul Krugman clearly isn’t taking retirement too well, as he’s taken to going on rants against his former employer and President Donald Trump, who lives rent-free in his brain. In a January 24 interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Krugman expressed his “rage” at his editors, which apparently began to balk at the extremism that plagued his columns (shocker). “I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” Krugman whined. “And that stopped being the case [in 2024]. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my...

A host of new laws went into effect in California Wednesday, including a statewide minimum wage boost to $16.50 an hour. While that’s the new floor for hourly pay, many Bay Area cities have set their own mandatory wage rates that are above the state minimum — and workers in some of those cities will see their own bump in pay come Jan. 1. This means that a raise could now be just a town away. According to the Bay Area Labor Center, some 25 local cities raised their minimum wages this year. Interestingly, a number of those cities sit...

The economics major is in dire straits. Across the nation, econ curricula aren’t instilling an appreciation for, or even a familiarity with, the economic way of thinking. Theory classes limit the power of economic analysis by reducing markets to sterile exercises in “perfect competition,” or else subordinating social science to social control by obsessing over “market failures.” Empirical classes equip students with sophisticated statistical tools but at the cost of reducing applied economics to data-mongering. The unfortunate result is that econ majors are almost always half-educated and quarter-lettered. They can memorize models and run regressions. They will confidently make pronouncements...

When Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” was being filmed in 1945, just as the Second World War was closing and a few years before the Cold War was heating up, the FBI investigated it for its supposed anti-capitalist themes. A memo said:“With regard to the picture It’s a Wonderful Life, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated...

China’s Producer Price Index, measuring factory-gate prices, fell in November year-on-year for the 26th straight month. The gross domestic product deflator, a broader gauge of prices across the nation, has been in negative territory for six straight calendar quarters, the longest period this century. The Consumer Price Index last month showed a 0.2% rise over the same period last year, well below the country’s 3% target. China is gripped by deflation, an economy-killer. Lower prices are putting businesses out of business. And when people expect prices to drop, they hold off purchases, further aggravating the slowdown.

Elon Musk added nearly $7 billion to his net worth Wednesday as Tesla’s shares rallied to a new intraday high amid a broader surge for tech stocks, as analysts have held optimism for the automaker in the weeks since the election.

It finally happened. The New York Times’s ego-maniacal and perpetually wrong economics columnist is finally divorcing himself from his propaganda-mill column after nearly 25 years. The Times Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury drafted the company eulogy for Krugman’s career there, and the over the top praise for his faulty economic crystal ball was nothing short of comical. “The authoritative voice. The lively writing. The direct style. The clear hand guiding readers through a thicket of policy, data and trade-offs,” read Kingsbury’s slobbering statement. “Paul is an important figure in the recent history of Times Opinion. Time and again, he took on...