Free Republic

Reshaping the economy in Imperial China.For 4,000 years, from 2070 BC to 1911 AD, one imperial family after another ruled China. The longest period in which a single family exercised power was 790 years, while the average tenure was 228 years. Most Westerners are familiar with the Tudors, Stuarts, and Windsors of England, or the Romanovs of Russia, but few are aware of the names of Chinese dynasties such as the Zhou, Han, or Ming, let alone the notable figures associated with them.In this essay, I acquaint the reader with a man named Wang Anshi 王安石. He lived from 1021...

Sowell's top 10 worst US presidents.I think he's nailed to top five. 1. bammy 2. LBJ 3. FDR 4. Wilson 5. Carter

The grandson of the 10th President of the United States, John Tyler, has died at 96 — 180 years after his grandfather was last in the White House. Harrison Ruffin Tyler, the son of President Tyler’s 13th child, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, died on Sunday evening at a Virginia nursing home, ending the last living link to an 18th-century presidential administration. When he was born on Nov. 9, 1928, his father was 75 years old. Having children into old age was a family trait, as President Tyler was 63 when Lyon was born. President Tyler would go on to have two...

Although Jews comprised a small part of the population of colonial America, the country’s Founding Fathers realized the importance of freedom of worship for even this small minority. George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island affirms the American commitment that bigotry would have no place in the US and that Jews would not be a tolerated minority but would “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” That commitment has withstood the test of time. While American Jews have always admired the nation’s Founding Fathers for their genius and vision, they tend to ignore that...

Former Biden White House adviser Susan Rice went on MSNBC to proclaim the Trump Administration's Signal group chat on the Houthi air strike "the biggest national security debacle that any national security advisor can remember. The pure laziness, malpractice, recklessness of the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA Director and others is bizarre." Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth questioned Rice's remarks, saying "I think most normal people would consider the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 the biggest national security debacle. Over 2,400 people were killed by a massive Japanese air...

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) at a Human Rights Campaign dinner in Los Angeles over the weekend: "We in these hot ass Texas streets, honey. Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there, Come on now! And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot ass mess, honey! So, so yes! Yes, yes, yes."

Prior to the 2024 election, President Biden issued Executive Order 14019. This order authorized the use of tax money to fund Democrat voter registration efforts. Using government revenue to support partisan voter registration drives is illegal. Now, House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R-Wisc) is demanding that the 14 federal agencies that participated in the implementation of this corrupt scheme turn over the documents and records detailing how they carried it out. Among the agencies involved were the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice. The...

While trying to catch President Donald Trump’s solicitor general nominee in a “gotcha” moment, Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin apparently defended enforcement of the infamous Supreme Court ruling that upheld the internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans during World War II. “Let’s go back to Korematsu — describe for me that circumstance that you think relieved an official from obeying a court order,” Durbin said to solicitor general nominee Dean John Sauer. “As bad as it was, that court order was followed for years, was it not?” In Korematsu v. U.S., the Supreme Court upheld the internment of...

With all this screeching by Liberals and Democrats that DOGE headed by private citizen Elon Musk is somehow "unconstitutional," they conveniently FORGET about the War Production Board, an agency established by EXECUTIVE ORDER by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during WWII. Here is a list of the members of the War Production Board which consists of NO elected officials. This information comes from WIKIPEDIA so no one can claim the source is somehow "right-wing":William Beverly Murphy, president and CEO of Campbell Soup Company Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric T. S. Fitch, president and CEO of Washington Steel Corporation Faustin Johnson...

A female driver was killed and her passenger seriously injured after they were tossed from a Tesla that flipped and then burst into flames on the FDR Drive in Manhattan early Tuesday, cops said. The Tesla struck a guardrail and flipped on the FDR near 70th Street on the Upper East Side just after 2:30 a.m., the NYPD said — with photos showing huge chunks of the electric vehicle scattered across the road. Both the woman and her 26-year-old passenger were ejected from the car, which burst into flames

President Donald Trump‘s second Oval Office got its big debut Monday, including the return of an Andrew Jackson portrait and the reemergence of the Reagan rug. The rug, which was in place during Ronald Reagan’s administration and during Trump’s first term, was reinstalled during Trump’s inauguration ceremony, according to CBS News. The Resolute Desk had to be partially disassembled in order to facilitate its return. The Andrew Jackson portrait has drawn controversy because Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, signed the Indian Removal Act, resulting in the Trail of Tears, and remains a polarizing figure almost 180 years after his death....

Times have changed. Consider these quotes from Roosevelt’s classic Four Freedoms Speech, January 6, 1941, contrasted with quotes from President Trump on January 6, 2021 and others: "....... Members of this new Congress ....... at no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.” – FDR, 1941. cf DJT in 2021: “Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore …… We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: to save our democracy.“ "(The dictators’) only interest is in a new...

Christmas is the most wonderful time of year. Christmas has also been celebrated through the years at the White House. Through the centuries, many presidents have reflected on the true meaning of Christmas. Here are four examples of presidents, of different parties, reflecting on the season—even during times of war—when we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.

Discover more about the policies that shaped a decade of hardship... and the lessons they hold for today...In 1940, Victor Records released the Dust Bowl Ballads, an album of songs written and performed by American folk singer Woody Guthrie. In two volumes and a dozen songs, the folk legend sang about the droughts that plagued North America in waves beginning in 1934 and ending in 1940.“On the 14th day of April of 1935, There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky. You could see that dust storm comin’, the cloud looked deathlike black, And through our...

Franklin D. Roosevelt was married for 40 years, but as the author writes in his new biography, it was the mistress whom he had abandoned at his wife’s request that the president spent the last days with THE HEALTH OF President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a cause for concern in early 1945. Some days he was solid and alert, the usual animated and witty conversationalist; a few hours later he could have a grey, ashen pallor, almost blue lips, severe shaking in his hands, glassy eyes and a slack jaw. Conscious of his frailty, probably sensing that the end was...

President-elect Donald Trump has said he intends to cut government spending by reasserting the presidential power of impoundment, a move certain to spark a court battle and one that could redefine presidential power for decades to come. Impoundment occurs when the president chooses not to disburse funds authorized by Congress; instead leaving them unspent in the U.S. Treasury.This power is not mentioned in the Constitution but has been employed by presidents since Thomas Jefferson. Congress enacted limits on the practice 50 years ago.Now, Trump intends to challenge the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA), which he believes is unconstitutional.“I will...

We should have lost the Venona Transcripts, intercepts of Soviet cold-war espionage activity. Word came down from the FDR White House to kill the Venona program, perhaps under the influence of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau who had an important assistant in secret-Communist Harry Dexter White. As it was the military officials responsible for the intercepts continued to accumulate them and the accuracy of Senator Joseph McCarthy's estimates of Communist infiltration of the State Department would ultimately be confirmed nearly to a "T". Military Intelligence revealed itself in that instance not to be an oxymoron. Every shift of the Joint Chiefs...

“Ponzi Scheme” is a term that was coined about 100 years ago. It was named after an Italian immigrant, Charles Ponzi, who realized he could get investors by promising large returns for undefined, high-yield investments. His endeavor needed to make just enough money to keep attracting new investors, whose money, after Ponzi’s cut, was used to pay some of the earlier investors. In our modern day, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme resulted in losses in the billions of dollars when the stock market tanked during the Great Recession. Selling the Deal Americans are just beginning to see the tip of the...

Meet historical fascism’s true heirs.In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has...

As if the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency isn't terrifying enough, she had to go and say this. Harris tells the Pittsburgh Economic Club, “I will engage in what Franklin Roosevelt called bold, persistent experimentation.” — Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) September 25, 2024 The last three years with Biden and Harris have been bad enough. This experiment is already a big fat failure. Because she has no idea how economics works. This is a horrifying threat. — \m/-=3Đ∇サ=-\m/ (@CargoShortLife) September 25, 2024 Thats not good lol pic.twitter.com/bN4JcUgIbm — Evan Dyer (@EvanLeeDyer) September 25, 2024 Like the last 3.5 years?...