Free Republic

He walks with a cane and is a bit hard of hearing. Yet Boris Chertok, 95, a former deputy chief designer in the Soviet bureau that put the first Sputnik satellite into orbit 50 years ago, still has strong opinions on the evolution of the country's space program. Chertok says the free-market changes instituted by President Boris Yeltsin after the Soviet Union fell apart were disastrous for Russian science. "We need to restore what we have lost over 15 years of destructive reforms," said Chertok, whose very name was once a state secret. "The market economy is incapable of fulfilling...

Just as the internet radically changed how America conducts business, artificial intelligence (AI) is also making waves in the workplace by taking thousands of jobs. It’s an outcome that industry experts have warned would happen, and professionals across multiple employment sectors have already been affected.Beyond artists and content creators, AI is also impacting professionals in marketing, technology, translation, various levels of administration, and management. It has been a silent and ongoing trend for two years, but tech insiders say this is just the beginning.A senior software engineer at Microsoft, Nandita Giri, shared her thoughts with The Epoch Times on what...

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation on Saturday to create a $1 billion fund for school voucher programs — the largest day-one school choice bill in the nation’s history. Abbott was joined by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows, the bill’s author State Sen. Brandon Creighton, and school choice advocates. The governor celebrated the bill’s passage by a vote of 85-63 in the Texas House two weeks ago. “Today is the culmination of a movement that has swept across our state and across our country,” Abbott said before signing the bill. “A movement driven by parents...

Executives at Ford Motor Company, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis are begging President-elect Donald Trump to keep in place President Joe Biden’s Electric Vehicle (EV) mandates. The plea comes as automakers have invested billions in EVs that have failed to turn a profit. In March of this year, Biden issued a federal regulation to begin phasing out gas-powered cars, requiring American automakers to produce EVs and ensure that by 2032, the majority of new cars sold in the U.S. market are electric. Since then, Ford, GM, and Stellantis have staked their futures on EVs. The results have been bleak as...

Indeed.

POTTERVILLE, Mich. — Former President Donald Trump said in an interview with NBC News on Thursday that if he is elected, his administration would not only protect access to in-vitro fertilization but would also have either the government or insurance companies cover the cost of the expensive service for American women who need it. "We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment," Trump said before adding, "We're going to be mandating that the insurance company pay." Asked to clarify whether the government would pay for IVF services or whether insurance...

During patriotic holidays, the news media applaud the Founding Fathers. But rarely does anyone mention some important facts about them: that they were smugglers, tax evaders, and traitors. Not only is this important, it is also praiseworthy; it produced the most advanced civilization ever known. The Revolution is often said to have begun in 1775 at the Battle of Lexgton [sic]. In truth, it began in the 16th century when the first colonists began traveling to the New World. Consider the hardships these people faced. Abandoning their relatives and friends, they boarded small leaky boats like the Mayflower—which was only...

President Joe Biden suggested Tuesday it is false that his administration is restricting consumer choice in the automobile market, but his administration recently finalized a rule that will force electric vehicles (EVs) to make up a much larger share of overall auto sales over the next decade. Biden made the remark during a Tuesday speech about his administration’s decision to significantly bolster tariffs against Chinese products including steel, semiconductor chips and EV batteries. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule in March that requires manufacturers to make EVs constitute between 35% and 56% of new cars sold in 2032,...

States like California, New York, and Massachusetts have passed climate policies specifically intended to jump-start this battery industry. But this year, for the first time ever, the fastest-growing energy storage market appears to be Texas, a free-market-affirming red state that officially cares little about solving climate change. Nonetheless, the state’s low-regulation, business-friendly landscape has created ideal conditions to build batteries quickly and at scale, just like it previously incubated thriving wind and solar markets.

Space X CEO Elon Musk and Argentinian President Javier Milei have met in Texas and spoke about working together to promote free markets and potential lithium projects. President Javier Milei’s chief spokesperson said that during their visit to Tesla’s Austin headquarters, the two talked about a range of issues, including the need to boost declining birth rates globally and the pursuit of technological advancement while upholding “liberty.” Musk has previously expressed his admiration for Milei’s unabashed support of private enterprise as well as his distaste for what he considers to be socialist excesses.

The Biden administration will likely complete regulations this week designed to punish gas-powered vehicles and pave the way for electric vehicles, whose average cost is roughly more than twice as expensive as average subcompact car. In its proposed rules published in May 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency wrote that it wanted to target vehicles that would phase-in over model years 2027 through 2032, stating, “EPA finds it appropriate to set new standards for model years after 2026 for both criteria pollutants and GHG at this time, rather than continuing its prior approach of coordinating the standards but setting them in...

...In December 1958, economist Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, published a short essay in FEE's periodical, The Freeman. In the 65 years since its introduction, this masterly work has become the most recognizable element of the Austrian School of economics. "I, Pencil" was conceived as a fanciful anthropomorphism, the genealogy of that most common of household tools, the lead pencil. In those few pages, Leonard Read demonstrated the magic woven by the Invisible Hand of the free market. In the generations since, millions of us have learned to respect how countless different industries, countless people,...

Bidenomonics has been, and will continue to be, a disaster. This is what happens when lawmakers manipulate economies. No one should ever expect a different outcome when politicians enact ideas that they believe are so brilliant that they will overcome the laws of economics. The way out of this mess is to make a policy U-turn to both unleash the economy and expand precious liberty. President Joe Biden last week bragged that his economic policies — straight from the Democrats blueprint that says “borrow, tax, spend, regulate, then do it all again” — are working. But as we’ve noted, Bidenomics...

...The Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank known for its pro-business allegiances — released a report Tuesday written by Alexander Salter, an economist at Texas Tech University, flirting with whether the US government should protect workers from free markets. Conservatives have long argued that the government should not tax, regulate, or subsidize industry because consumers are better off when companies are forced to compete for their dollars. However, the consequences of globalization for American manufacturing have caused many conservatives to reconsider the need for government intervention. Heritage, once the center of free-market conservatism, is now at this very crossroads....

The world’s central planners meet, speak, plan and party together. Whether they do so in Davos or New York, Paris or Washington D.C.; whether in the name of the WEF or UN or Congress or EU, these central planners share the same goal: to repeat so many seemingly-unrelated lies, so often and so vigorously, that they can get the public to believe that statism is the solution. Well, their solution will never be right, because their premises will never be right. Facts are facts, no matter what the dictators of Davos may say. For example, a few truths: 1. Carbon...

Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution? (Part 1) | February 25, 2022 | toldinstone

YouTube has a brand new censorship tactic that appears to be affecting small creators – and one that, on the face of it, makes no sense. Several livestreams posted on Google’s platform last weekend by truckers protesting in Canada have had their audience limited. The reason given to viewers trying to access the videos? They were too popular. “Video unavailable: This video is popular! Due to limited creator history, we’re limiting the number of viewers,” YouTube’s message reads, and then advises visitors to subscribe to the channel “to help this creator reach a broader audience.” No word, though, on whether...

If you had a financial incentive to do something that wasn't exactly honest, would you abandon your principles and take the cash? Apparently, that's what many medical providers and hospitals in America have been doing, especially since the beginning of the Biden administration. The numbers are staggering — both in money hospitals took in and the very real possibility that their actions caused people to die. If the accusations are true, what happened is truly evil and, I think, points directly to a cause: the removal of God and morality from society, replacing these brakes with what passes for modern...

Actor Jay Johnston has reportedly been fired from the cast of Bob's Burgers after it was revealed that he participated in the riot at the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. Johnston has been the voice of Jimmy Pesto on Bob's Burgers for about a decade now, and is also known for roles on productions like Mr. Show, Arrested Development and Anchorman, among others. On Friday, The Daily Beast reported that Johnston had been "banned" from working on Bob's Burgers. Two sources familiar with the situation at the Fox animated sitcom said that Johnston will not be allowed to...

Last week the corrupt media’s penchant for spinning all things conservative caused a near-fatal case of whiplash. The left began by chastising conservatives for supposedly building “its own echo chamber,” but by the next day, when news broke that Devin Nunes was resigning from Congress to serve as the CEO of Donald Trump’s new media company, the complained-of conservative ecosystem merely represented grift. Both narratives are false, however, which is precisely why leftists peddled them so hard. Axios launched the “echo chamber” accusation with its article titled, “Right wing builds its own echo chamber.” “Conservatives are aggressively building their own...